Corbynmania: Young people across Britain are flocking to Jeremy Corbyn’s cause (photo: Chris Beckett/Flickr

The late Tony Benn seldom missed an opportunity to scorn weathercocks: those slippery, chameleon-like characters who populate both the government and opposition benches in alarming numbers. Infinitely preferable to be a signpost, according to Benn, and stick staunchly to one ideology regardless of public opinion or shifting political zeitgeists. Of course, there is a substantial degree of truth to this. The last great British statesman, Lady Thatcher, stood firmly by her principles despite strong opposition from both the public and members of her own Cabinet. Her opponents — Gorbachev and trades unions alike — may have despised the Iron Lady’s politics, but they certainly respected her grit.

Benn’s protégé Jeremy Corbyn, however, is an altogether more dangerous species of signpost. His extreme left-wing rhetoric is peppered with moral absolutes, imbuing what would ordinarily be laughably arcane policies with a degree of credibility. He talks about social justice and solidarity with such earnestness and zeal that even I, an erstwhile President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, find myself forgetting that Corbyn is a man who believes that reopening coalmines, printing banknotes and  holding peace talks with ISIS are sure-fire routes to a more prosperous and harmonious society.

Hardly surprising, then, that my contemporaries are flocking in droves to support Corbyn’s campaign. In an age where political activism has been reduced to Facebook witch-hunts and Twitter debates; where blaming inequality on the straw man of capitalism is easier than engaging in meaningful introspection; and where an entire generation has grown up insulated from the grim realities of life in the Soviet Union, young people across Britain are parroting Corbyn’s ill-conceived platitudes on renationalisation and ending austerity. At Oxford, the website of a student group calling itself Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century decries the injustices supposedly inherent in any capitalist society while lionising Lenin and Trotsky — both practitioners of mass killings and torture — as “great revolutionaries”. Even the formerly moderate Oxford University Labour Club has officially endorsed Corbyn’s campaign, calling for “socialist democracy” with the sort of hypocrisy that only a group of largely white, privately-educated Home Counties kids can pull off. But I can just about excuse the youthful naivety of my peers; surely the wisdom that comes with age and a better acquaintance with the works of Orwell will teach them that unreconstructed Marxism is not a political bandwagon they ought to be jumping on.

The intellectual laziness of Corbyn’s political opponents, however, is inexcusable. Much of the centre-Right, having decided that Corbyn poses no great threat to the Conservative majority, has resorted to lampooning him at every opportunity. He has been caricatured by Toby Young as a Japanese soldier emerging from the Burmese jungle, unaware that the Second World War has ended and ready to refight long-settled battles. David Cameron himself has declared it “fun to watch Labour make a mess of things”. Most distastefully, numerous grassroots Conservatives have paid £3 to register as Labour party supporters in order to vote for Corbyn, gleefully documenting their efforts on social media under the banner “Tories for Corbyn”.