Driving though France to catch a cross-channel ferry is an odd situation in which to try to follow the UK news. Back in 1997 we tuned into British radio and heard outraged callers demanding to know why the BBC had been insensitive enough to run a documentary on the land-speed record after Diana died in a car crash. That was weird, but not so weird as being on a ship where we seemed to be the only people not worshipping in front of enormous TV screens installed for the funeral. We were coming back to a country that was a bit different to the one we had left three weeks before. Eighteen years later we managed to pick up decent reception for radio 5 just before the Labour leadership result was announced, but every bridge and power-line we passed under resulted in a whoosh of deep-bass interference, so that key bits of information were lost and we had to infer them from later commentary. And then the only programme on the ferry was rolling BBC News, a succession of talking heads and policy wonks on College Green, telling the public what to think about events which had revealed just what an important section of the public thinks about people like them.
BBC journalists, newspaper columnists and professional politicians all seemed to be carrying on with zombie incantations of what they take to be the the eternal truth of British politics, as decreed by the prophet Tony: tack to the centre. This hardly seems adequate to what has happened. Jeremy Corbyn, the most awkward of the awkward squad, previously barely a household name in his own house, has thrashed the professional elite of one of Britain’s two main political parties, gaining nearly 60 per cent of the vote against candidates with ministerial experience and considerable public reputations. The estimable Flying Rodent [deployed the following well-judged sporting analogy](http://flyingrodent.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/just-any-kind-of-sign.html):
> In football terms, this is like East Fife beating Celtic 13-0 at Parkhead – one of those things that should just never, ever happen.
> To stretch the analogy, I can tell you now that if a bottom-tier team dealt out that kind of drubbing to the richest club in the country, nobody would put it down to East Fife’s sudden samba football. The headlines wouldn’t read “Fifers Fantastic”.
> They’d say – “Woeful Celtic hammered”, “Shambolic Celts stuffed” and, most importantly, “Fans demand immediate resignation and suicide of everyone associated with this mortifying catastrophe”.
But the media friends of the androids who Corbyn defeated thought the important thing to say was that the he had no future, rather than querying the performance of their preferred candidates.
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