One of the many pamphlets offering advice to Jeremy Corbyn came from an organisation called “Labour Party Marxists”. In an unsigned article titled “Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures” it told readers:

. . . have no doubt: the right will resort to unconstitutional methods in an attempt to undermine, discredit, isolate and then finally oust [Corbyn]. In this it will be aided and abetted not only by the City, the military-industrial complex and the capitalist press and media. Special branch, MI5 and their American cousins will provide information, advisers and coordination. If he is going to succeed, comrade Corbyn will have to resort to revolutionary methods.

Reading these words it was hard to believe that just 128 days separated the general election and Corbyn’s election as Labour leader. In May, it would have been inconceivable that a group called “Labour Party Marxists” would have viewed the next Labour leader as anything other than an utter sell-out, a capitalist stooge. Yet here they were, calling on the Leader of the Opposition to “resort to revolutionary methods”.

In the immediate aftermath of the election, Liz Kendall, the candidate from the Right of the party, stole a march on Labour leadership candidates with a more honest post-mortem than many of her colleagues were prepared to administer. Her message was that voters still did not trust Labour with their money, that the party did not appeal sufficiently to Middle England, that their pitch to the electorate was too negative and its message lacked the aspirational tone that had worked for the party in the recent past. This, most commentators considered, would be the tone of the contest between Kendall and her more established rivals, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham. Corbyn, whose inclusion in the election had only been made possible with the nominations of MPs who did not want him to become leader, would be a quaint sideshow and a valve through which the Left of the party could let off some steam.

That, of course, is not what happened. (Kendall took under 5 per cent of the vote.) After Corbyn’s unlikely victory, veteran Labour MP Dame Margaret Beckett said she regarded her decision to nominate Corbyn as “probably one of the biggest political mistakes I’ve ever made”.

Jeremy Corbyn would have been at the refugee demonstration whether or not he had just been elected Labour leader. Going to demonstrations is what he does. It is what a significant portion of the British Left does and has always done. As the rally weaves its way into Parliament Square, Corbyn supporters who’d been milling about outside the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, hoping to snatch a glimpse of their hero, join the crowd. Their T-shirts and posters read, “I voted for a different kind of politics.”