Jeremy Corbyn’s rise as Labour leader was foreseen by no one, least of all him. Illustration by Cun Shi

The astonishing political emergence of Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing leader of the British Labour Party, is the sort of thing that passes for normal in Western democracies these days. Since the economic crash in 2008, anti-establishment types have cropped up everywhere. Corbyn, a sixty-six-year-old socialist, had never held a position of authority in his party or in government before being elected last summer on a platform of benign economic populism. He is Syriza in Greece; he is Podemos in Spain; he is Sanders in America. His politics rebel against a Britain that is eager to join foreign wars and pallid in the face of social inequality. “There has to be some kind of a reckoning,” Corbyn told me recently. “You actually have to run an economy for the benefit of people, not run for the benefit of hedge-fund managers.”

Corbyn believes in grassroots policymaking, so many of his plans aren’t fully worked out yet, but they include renationalizing Britain’s railways and giving up its nuclear weapons. He wants to raise taxes on the rich, strengthen trade unions, and replace the House of Lords with an elected chamber. If Labour is reëlected in the next general election, in 2020, Corbyn envisages broad public involvement—in the form of co-operatives or government control—in the nation’s largely privatized energy and housing markets. He has mused in the past about abolishing the British Army. Universities will be free.

A big part of Corbyn’s appeal is how understated he is about all this. “I never set out in life with huge personal ambitions,” he said. Corbyn joined Labour as a teen-ager. Until last year, he was best known as a figure of perpetual protest, an old-fashioned lefty who opposed military interventions around the world and the inherent cruelty of capitalism. And yet when Corbyn speaks of himself and his political vision it is often in terms that are deliberately oblique. He likes to answer questions with questions. “Do I feel happiest with the people and their demands and their campaigns and their successes and their defeats?” Corbyn said. “Yes, I do. I can’t deny that.”

Corbyn lives in a narrow three-story house in Islington North, the inner-city London constituency that he has represented in Parliament for the past thirty-three years, and he buys his undershirts at the local street market. He is slight, with a white beard, shoulders that taper gently from left to right, and a front tooth that snags when he smiles. He travels by bicycle or train, avoiding whenever possible the official car that comes with his office.

Since becoming a major figure in British public life, Corbyn has often come across as a humble man who is being carried on a wave of feeling. Some people think he is naïve or unintelligent. Corbyn grows fruit and vegetables on a small allotment a few miles from his house, and one unkind reference that I heard in Westminster compared him to Chauncey Gardiner, the character played by Peter Sellers in the 1979 film “Being There.” In the film, a simpleton gardener is cast out of his dead master’s house and almost becomes President of the United States on the strength of his homespun sayings. “He is an allotment digger,” a former Labour cabinet minister told me, of Corbyn. “Plodding.” Consciously or not, Corbyn can play up to this image. For years, he was a member of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Cheese. When I asked him if he now has time to tend his garden, Corbyn said, “I made jam last autumn and I will make it again this year.”

In person, Corbyn is amiable in the extreme. He likes to share his sandwiches and sometimes absent-mindedly touches you on the arm. “I do have a sense of humor,” he confided. “But don’t you go telling anybody about it.” Yet Corbyn’s politics are not anodyne, and his takeover of the Labour Party has destabilized an already fractious political scene. Since 2010, the right-of-center Conservatives, first in coalition with the Liberal Democrats and then governing alone, have imposed unpopular spending cuts in order to close Britain’s fiscal deficit. The Scottish independence referendum, in 2014, which almost broke up the U.K., still resonates. And on June 23rd, with tension high over immigration and the economy, the country faces an even more traumatic vote, over its membership in the European Union. Polls suggest that the population is almost perfectly divided on a decision that will have profound implications for the nation’s economy, its neighbors, and its standing in the world.

In the midst of this, Labour, one of Britain’s hallowed political parties, which grew out of the workers’ movements of the industrial revolution, has become contorted under Corbyn. Although the Party is more or less united on wanting to stay in Europe (unlike the Conservatives, who are deeply split), it has spent the past eight months in a state of unhappy shock. Corbyn was elected by Labour’s membership—a collection of trade-union supporters, paid-up members, and “registered supporters,” who paid three pounds and voted online—with a larger mandate than any leader in memory. But the Party’s more moderate élites fear that Corbyn is a disaster and that his ideas will never be taken seriously by the British public.

Even Labour’s one notable victory under Corbyn—the election of Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London—has been vexed. Khan served as a transportation minister in the last Labour Government and has spent his career deep within the political mainstream. Throughout his campaign, Khan sought to distance himself from his Party leader, especially during its final days, when Labour was engulfed in an internal crisis over anti-Semitism, related in part to Corbyn’s radical past. But on the several recent occasions when I saw Corbyn, he was always the calmest person in the room. “It’s important to be relaxed about things,” he told me.

Corbyn is an outsider, but he is also the creature of a certain time and place in British history—specifically, the history of the Labour Party. That is why many of his colleagues find his rise to the leadership so difficult to accept. Within Labour, the grainy left-wing argot that Corbyn speaks—of “industrial democracy” and the “propertied classes”—recalls a set of ideas that were last abroad in the Party at the turn of the nineteen-eighties. In 1979, after Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives had thrown Labour out of office, the Party moved to the left and ran, for a time, on a quasi-socialist manifesto that later became known as “the longest suicide note in history.” On June 9, 1983, with Thatcher ascendant, Labour suffered its worst election defeat in modern times.

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Corbyn was one of the new Labour M.P.s elected to the House of Commons that day. He was thirty-four. Another new member, four years younger, was Tony Blair. Through the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Blair was part of the vanguard that dismantled Labour’s left-wing platform, including its commitment to nuclear disarmament and Clause IV, which called for the public ownership of industry. Rebranded as “New Labour” after Blair became leader, in 1994, the Party became tough on crime and embraced the free market, moving to the center much as, in the United States, the Democrats did under President Bill Clinton. In 1997, Labour returned to power for the first time in eighteen years.