By now, the verdict seems settled. Jeremy Corbyn and Zara Sultana’s new party has barely staggered out of the blocks before tripping over its own shoelaces. Briefings against briefings. Process rows. “Who’s in charge?” headlines on a loop. Commentators are already reaching for the familiar script: shambles, amateur hour, doomed.
And yet, perversely, this may be the best possible start the party could have had.
Let’s be clear: the early weeks have been noisy, confusing and at times painfully public. The press has had a field day. The absence of a single leader has been framed as weakness, indecision, or worse, cowardice. In Westminster logic, chaos equals failure. But that logic only holds if the aim was to launch another personality-driven vehicle, sleek enough for the morning shows and brittle enough to crack the first time its leader sneezes.
It wasn’t.
The party’s stated purpose is to demonstrate that politics is bigger than people. That isn’t a slogan you can half-mean. It demands consequences. And the most immediate, uncomfortable consequence is refusing to crown a leader – especially when you have two nationally recognisable figures right there, ready-made for the job.
The early squabbles, far from disproving this model, actually confirm it. When power is genuinely shared, disagreements don’t get buried in a leader’s office or laundered through anonymous aides. They surface. They’re argued over. They look ugly to a political culture trained to prefer stage-managed unity over real democracy.
The “disastrous” press coverage is similarly revealing. Much of it boils down to the same complaint: this party is not behaving like a normal party. Exactly. It is being judged against rules it is explicitly trying to reject, rules that concentrate authority, flatten internal debate and turn politics into a spectator sport.
There is also something refreshingly honest about a party that begins with process rather than personality. Instead of asking voters to suspend disbelief and trust a charismatic figure to work it all out later, it is saying: this is how we intend to govern, even when it’s awkward.
Critics will say voters don’t want complexity. But voters are already living with the consequences of simple stories told by powerful individuals. If democratic politics is to mean anything more than swapping one leader for another, it has to start somewhere.
This party didn’t stumble at the first hurdle. It deliberately knocked the hurdle down and asked why it was there in the first place. In a political system obsessed with control and choreography, that’s not failure. It’s a declaration of intent.