I’m an Islington North resident – this is why Jeremy Corbyn won

Jeremy Corbyn’s win in Islington North was not a foregone conclusion.

Yes, he has been a popular local MP for 40 years. When he turns up to the summer fair at my children’s primary school, he’s the second most popular guest after Gunnersaurus, the Arsenal dinosaur mascot.

But London is a Labour city, and a vote for Mr Corbyn was, until now, a vote for the Labour Party. There was every possibility that Labour could have retained the seat.

Media dispatches from Islington North always feature the café by Finsbury Park station where the owner is so devoted to Mr Corbyn that cut-outs of his face adorn cardboard love hearts pinned to the walls. The people who love Mr Corbyn really love him.

But the average resident doesn’t have that strength of feeling. In the network of streets where I live, clustered around the old Highbury ground, posters in front windows were pretty evenly split between Mr Corbyn and Labour.

Not everyone is sufficiently plugged into internal Labour Party politics, news sites or social media to know that Mr Corbyn had been expelled from the party and was standing as an independent.

I’m sure there will have been people who put a cross beside his name in the belief that they were still getting a Labour MP.

But from my vantage point as a local resident, there were two reasons why Mr Corbyn triumphed.

Firstly, his canvassers put in the leg work.

Groups of them fanned out across the ward every day, knocking on doors or stopping passers-by to hand out flyers and engage them in conversation about their voting intentions. Young people in Vote Corbyn T-shirts were everywhere. On election morning, Vote Corbyn slogans with smiley faces were chalked on the pavements.

I never met a Labour Party canvasser although a couple of flyers were pushed through the letterbox. The only person standing outside the church hall polling station on election day, ticking off names and addresses, was from Mr Corbyn’s camp.

Perhaps Labour thought this part of the ward was a lost cause because it is Mr Corbyn’s heartland: he lives just up the road. But their absence in these past weeks was noted. If Labour wasn’t going to bother showing up to ask for votes, why should voters show up for Labour?

Secondly, Labour’s choice of candidate was disastrous.

Praful Nargund is a wealthy entrepreneur who moved to Islington in 2015 and until last year ran a chain of private IVF clinics set up with his mother, Prof Geeta Nargund. This went down like a cup of cold sick with many Labour voters and was a gift for Mr Corbyn, whose local campaigns included saving the A&E department at the Whittington Hospital.

Mr Nargund was selected from a shortlist with a grand total of two candidates, and his political experience amounts to being a local councillor for the Barnsbury ward since May 2022.

Such a CV looked paltry compared to Mr Corbyn’s four decades of service. Mr Nargund’s leaflets were by-the-numbers stuff about Labour’s national policies, whereas Mr Corbyn’s could boast of local achievements including saving the number 4 bus route and protecting the tiny nature reserve beside Arsenal Tube station.

Mr Corbyn’s well-documented support for the Palestinian cause will also have won him plenty of votes in this area, which has a significant Muslim population. What are Mr Nargund’s views on Israel-Gaza? Who knows.

Mr Nargund appeared slick and corporate, the kind of politician who would treat being elected as a stepping stone to a Cabinet position, rather than putting in the hard yards at constituency surgeries.

That could be an unfair assumption but it was difficult to test because Mr Nargund was barely visible during the campaign. He refused to grant an interview to the Islington Tribune newspaper – a pro-Mr Corbyn paper certainly.

But by not speaking to them he gave the impression that he was hiding (although not to the extent of the Labour chair for Islington North, Alison McGarry, who is understood to have quit her post after attempting to hide behind a hedge when she was spotted campaigning for Mr Corbyn).

Islington North has its privileged corners – the ward includes Highbury Fields, a green space bordered by huge Georgian terraces and made famous by the “Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed,” scene at the end of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One of the houses is currently for sale, yours for £6.5m.

But Islington is also one of the most deprived boroughs in England, with alarming rates of child poverty. Highbury Fields couldn’t be further from the part of Islington North where Mr Corbyn has made his home.

The great irony of the Tories’ constant invoking of the ‘Islington metropolitan elite’ during Boris Johson’s premiership was that Mr Johnson lived at one of Islington’s most expensive addresses, while Mr Corbyn resides in the scruffiest house in one of the borough’s scruffiest streets.

He presents himself as a voice for the vulnerable, concerned with the plight of refugees, lack of housing and poverty. To the people who live nearby, Mr Corbyn is one of them and Praful Nargund may as well be from Mars.

How will Mr Corbyn spend his first days as the independent MP for Islington North?

Well it’s the school fair on Saturday. He might turn up. If not, we’ll still have Gunnersaurus.