Comrade Corbyn is a romp through the history, upbringing, life and very occasionally loves of Jeremy Corbyn. It is not authorised, nor did Corbyn work with the author, Rosa Prince, though there are many quotes sourced from close friends and family. Corbyn seems a more than usually guarded person, especially for one who has chosen to live his life in the public eye. It is this that makes this book hard to mine for racy anecdotes or juicy gossip. For a man who has been married twice and has also worked for years alongside his one-time lover, very little of that exists.

So there are no jaw-dropping salacious details to be found here. Nor is it a hagiography or hatchet-job. It is instead a fairly comprehensive and forensic story of an unlikely political outsider who became the ultimate – if somewhat unexpected – insider.

Corbyn’s childhood is covered in detail, but, as elsewhere in the book – there are significant gaps in our understanding of the depth of his feelings. We are given a sense of a boy who was happy at home but less so at a strict grammar school. But what led those feelings (not uncommon as they are) to such a strength that they would ultimately result in the breakup of his second marriage? This depth remains hinted at, but unexplored in any detail.

Corbyn is presented as a man with little if any hinterland. It is somewhat ironic that it is a man who clearly has little use for anything outside of politics – perhaps the ultimate career politician – who has been such a strong beneficiary of the mood of anti-politics that has gripped the United Kingdom and elsewhere since both the Iraq war and the crash of 2008.

He is also an openly factional politician. Never presented as the man fighting the fights, he is always in the room when they are taking place. Always decent, he never wielded the knife until now, but it is pretty clear he knows where the bodies are buried.

He is a man obsessed, and possessed of a strong and burning desire to fight for justice, peace and freedom. He throws himself into his causes absolutely, and, as can be seen throughout this book, championed many vital and important things before it became fashionable – even on the broad left – to do so. For example, he fought for gay and women’s rights when the Labour party was often not inclined to do so.

We learn a lot about what Corbyn is against in this book but what he is in favour of is perhaps less clear (usually expressed as positive but amorphous concepts like peace and justice: hard to rail against certainly, but also hard to achieve directly in a complex world).

It is that lifetime habit of opposition that Corbyn now has to break to lead Labour into government. Prince paints a picture of a private, passionate and political individual and not one given to change even when under extreme pressure. Self-assurance is a wonderful thing. But it is not the same as leadership. This will be Corbyn’s hardest lesson.

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Emma Burnell is a political blogger and campaigner

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Comrade Corbyn – A Very Unlikely Coup: How Jeremy Corbyn Stormed to the Labour Leadership

Rosa Prince

BiteBack Publishing | 400pp | £20