We wanted Gandalf, not Paul Daniels or Debbie McGee, and despite a consistent right wing attack - a whole lot of jiggery-pokery including wheeling out the old guard Blairites, late ballots and purging - we got him, we got our very own grey wizard.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media's attack on Jeremy Corbyn has been twofold from the off. It first began when Jeremy threw his "bought from the Co-op hat" in the ring, with vitriolic and dismissive assertions Jeremy couldn't win the Labour leadership:
Julia Hartley Brewer: "Insane"? Perhaps better than thick or lacking judgement. No one in the Labour party - well, at least no one remotely sane - thinks Jeremy Corbyn will win the party leadership.
Of course, Jeremy's now won the Labour leadership, and by an absolute landslide, so it's egg on the face of all those journalists so severely "lacking judgement", or at least paid to lack judgement (a worryingly long list, which in of itself warrants a post).
Anyway, unable to credibly spin or condemn the fact Jeremy has won with aplomb (in the first round of voting and in all categories of the vote), the same journalists so severely lacking judgement, or at least paid to lack judgement, can now reassert their fallback plan: Jeremy Corbyn cannot and will not win the General Election.
Daily Mail: Red and Buried.
Obviously, I don't agree with the Daily Mail's hissing pessimism. Instead, in the New Statesman, Laurie Penny makes an excellent point:
"Corbyn, however, has been re-elected by the people of Islington North consistently since 1983 and, like Bernie Sanders in the US, seems as surprised as anyone to suddenly be reaping the rewards of a lifetime of sticking to his principles - principles that once put Corbyn on the moderate left of Labour and now make him look, at least in the estimation of much of the press, like the nightmare offspring of Che Guevara and Emma Goldman dressed up in a Stalin costume. And all for proposing a modest increase in the top rate of income tax."
Needless to say, over the next months we will witness more hatchet jobs, more attempts to smear, undermine and marginalise the principles and policies Jeremy Corbyn stands for. Each commentator asserting Jeremy Corbyn cannot win the General Election because he is too far to the left, while neglecting to offer a balanced or impartial argument as to why "being to the left" is actually a bad thing anyway.
And that is to say a bad thing for anyone other than the top 1% (the super rich who own the newspapers and hire a staff essentially well-paid to argue their agenda).
For those at the bottom and middle of society (the 99%) they will have to listen close to what Jeremy Corbyn has to say; they will have to judge Jeremy on his own words and not the interpretations of pundits and hacks, because the assertion Jeremy Corbyn cannot win the next General Election has little to do with his policies, but far more to do with the right wing and establishment's agenda. It is essentially saying your - the disenfranchised, the working and middle classes' - birthday parties will not be a happy affair because we the media, are going to piss on your cake.