In 2018, Jeremy Corbyn seemed like a prime-minister-in-waiting. Addressing the Labour Party conference at Liverpool’s ACC arena that September, he attacked Britain’s then-leader Theresa May for stalling in negotiations over the country’s exit from the European Union — urging her resignation in a speech delivered just days before his own alternative talks with EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

In place of May’s Conservative Party, Corbyn offered a Labour government capable of delivering a “socialism for the twenty-first century.” It was a vision based on the “commonsense” nationalization of Britain’s rail, water, and energy companies; a raft of measures to “rebuild and transform” communities left behind by austerity and neoliberalism; and a pro-peace foreign policy that would deliver the British recognition of a Palestinian state. He gleefully quoted a senior Conservative politician who lamented that Corbyn’s ideas had caught “the mood of our time.”

This past weekend, a woman who had watched that conference speech as a hopeful Labour delegate told me, upon exiting a different event at the same venue, that “if I didn’t get out, I was going to smash my head through the wall.” She was attending the founding conference of Your Party (YP) — the new outfit headed by Corbyn, fellow ex-Labour MP Zarah Sultana, and several independents who had won on pro-Palestine platforms in the 2024 general election, out-organizing Labour in formerly safe seats.