To everybody's bemusement, what has been haunting British politics over the last few days is not the spectre of socialism, but a flesh-and-blood socialist in his mid-sixties. Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour party with the biggest electoral mandate of any party leader in British political history - almost 60 per cent of nearly half-a-million voters. Yet, the consistency and conviction with which Mr Corbyn describes himself as a socialist, unabashedly looking back to what many would call the lost ideals of the Seventies, have touched a nerve in the Labour electorate, though not in many of his parliamentary comrades. Only about a tenth of the party's MPs has backed him. After the defeat of Tony Blair's New Labour, and the inglorious exit of Ed Miliband's soft Leftism, it is the old, hard Left of a eurosceptical, anti-austerity, pacifist, trade unionist socialism that will now be embodied in the figure of Britain's new leader of the Opposition.

The strangeness, and deeper significance, of such a turn of events is perhaps best brought home by the fact that Mr Corbyn, a vegetarian and virtually a teetotaller, was awarded the Gandhi International Peace Award in 2013 for his "consistent efforts over a 30-year parliamentary career to uphold the Gandhian values of social justice and non-violence". Try imagining the Mahatma ruling any of the 21st century's democracies, and it will be clear why Britain is still in a state of alarmed and exhilarated shock. The prime minister and his kind have, of course, declared Mr Corbyn a threat to national security. He calls Hamas and Hezbollah his "friends" (though this is an over-simplification of a much more nuanced position); he believes that Britain should not intervene militarily in Syria, and should work towards nuclear disarmament. His stance on European Union membership is less clear, perhaps necessarily so. But if there is a conflict between British workers' rights and EU membership, there is little ambiguity about where his allegiances would lie. In terms of his social policies, it might suffice to say that he broke up with his second wife of 12 years for wanting to send one of their sons to a grammar school. It is tempting to regard the doggedness of such positions as an improbable form of idealism that could never rescue a party, or an ideology, from irrelevance. Yet, a startling proportion of ordinary Britons wants to pitch its hopes on precisely such an impossible man. That hopefulness is real enough.