After defeat comes the long battle to define it. According to Owen Jones, the British left’s most prominent commentator, there are three narratives about Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party and its failure. One, favored by much of the establishment, is that Corbyn’s tenure was defined by intolerance, extremism, and an abiding unfitness for “high office.” Another, much more popular among its grassroots supporters, is that the Corbyn leadership was sunk by a campaign of sabotage by the establishment, inside the party and out, and that the man himself was destroyed by an unprecedented smear campaign.

Between these two narratives, Jones sets up his new book, This Land, as offering us something of a middle path. His proposed corrective admits the formidable odds, vicious hostility, and difficult political conditions Corbynism faced, but also charges that the leadership “shot itself repeatedly in the foot.” Above all, Jones thinks, there was “a disastrous failure in strategy.” This Land is confidently framed as a kind of instructive work of history, oriented hopefully to the future: emancipatory projects are not destined to fail, but “if our time is to come, then we must learn from our past.”

Jones intends his book, then, as a productive exercise in lesson-learning, retrospectively mapping the Corbyn leadership’s key failings and strategic errors. Yet, the approach he adopts poses problems for the book’s chances of fulfilling its central task. Jones openly declares his standpoint as that of the participant-observer, and then goes on to produce an uneven mixture of narrative journalism, fragmentary oral history, and autobiographical commentary. We hear more participant than observer, and the product is less a history of Corbynism than a kind of memoir.