JC - Superstar

The irony was not lost: a JC preaching to a rapturous crowd of recent converts about a fairer society and being kind to one another. But, then, irony is something the Glastonbury Festival does well.

For all the cool headliners that Worthy Farm has hosted down the years, the mischievous, subversive hippy in Michael Eavis (with the same traits inherited by his co-organiser daughter Emily) has always found space for acts that the largely student-age audience will treat with good-natured bonne humeur. Today we had Barry Gibb, and in the past the likes of ELO, Tom Jones, Tony Christie and, notoriously, Rolf Harris - long before Her Majesty's Prison Service caught up with him - taking the stage with his wobbleboard to do Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport. Ho and, indeed, ho.

Jeremy Corbyn's appearance on the Pyramid Stage yesterday was as contrived a piece of Glastonbury wink-wink as it was a smart booking by Clan Eavis, tapping into arguably the coolest British politician of the moment. Not that politicians are cool. Ever. But here was the 68-year-old trenchant left-winger - later described by Katy Perry (who played before a smaller crowd, it must be noted) as "the Bernie Sanders of the UK" - wearing a shirt of undeterminable vintage (but clearly right-on origin), still resembling a Haringey geography teacher at a Fair Trade rally. And yet, in front of a crowd eagerly awaiting the day's headline performance from the Foo Fighters, was a politician who might possibly have thought the Foo Fighters were a south-east Asian guerilla cause he should get behind, generating the sort of crowd reaction normally reserved for headline performers like the Foos themselves.

Throughout the day, and even during the previous evening's Radiohead set, the chant "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn" had been sung as passionately as any I've ever heard from a football crowd. There was a kind of crossover and not just the ultra-ironic "Wenger out!" flag being waved incongruously in front of the Arsenal-supporting Labour leader. Glastonbury has always had its political edge, but more to do with either the artists and their agendas, or associations with worthy causes. But not even during Tony Blair's messianic rise to power, or in the Kinnock era that paved the way for Blair, has the daddy/mummy/parent-of-no-distinct-gender of all music festivals allowed a politician on The Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury's main event platform.

Corbyn's appearance was a strange - if brief - snapshot of cultism. Go back to April when the General Election was announced and you wouldn't have to go far, even within the Labour Party, to find those who felt that Corbyn was dead in the water and would be gone by June 9. But on June 24, even having failed to win the election, he appeared more popular than ever, a position emboldened by Theresa May's abject public persona which itself was worsened by her disastrous election campaign and then her shoddy initial response to the Grenfell fire.

Even I was surprised by the clamour that grew around Corbyn as the election campaign unfolded, with crowd sizes at rallies from Reading to Birmingham, and from Gateshead to his native Islington growing bigger and bigger. In fact, his 20 minute 'set' at Glastonbury felt like just another date on a national tour, delivering a rousing speech on poverty and several pet isms as part of his "for the many, not the few" agenda.

For the latter-day Glastonbury crowd, Corbyn's words fell neatly. "Politics is actually about everyday life," he declared. "It’s about all of us, what we dream, what we want, and what we want for everybody else." He thundered on about how the elites (including media commentators) "got it wrong" and spoke directly to "the number of young people who got involved for the first time. Because they were fed up with being denigrated, fed up with being told they don’t matter. Fed up with being told they never participate, and utterly fed up with being told that their generation was going to pay more to get less in education, in health, in housing, in pensions and everything else."

This was the greatest hits package, cleverly tailored to the audience. It was hardly a recreation of the punk spirit and all that "no future" nihilism, but 'ver kids' lapped it up, demonstrating an accommodation that clearly had no intention of questioning what Corbyn's lukewarm approach to Brexit did for their future chances of experiencing life outside of the UK.

That, then, is the truly remarkable - and baffling - thing about Jezza: how he could have been a no-hoper to win the election, regarded as well-meaning and principled, but with associations in his past and convictions in his present that many felt made him unelectable. Regardless, he still gets mobbed pulling pints and generating a roaring trade in T-shirts bearing his own image at a music festival.

Fair play to him, though. Clearly it would have been an irony-stretch to have invited May (who doesn't, apparently, do public gatherings larger than Cabinet meetings) or, worse, Farage who wouldn't have even been able to say "Good afternoon Glastonbury!" without getting bottled off. Nor would departing LibDem leader Tim Farron have fared much better following his botched positioning on gay marriage. Maybe the Greens co-leader, Caroline Lucas, might have endured, but not on the main stage.

And so, in a Glastobury nominally dominated by Radiohead's excellent (but somewhat Marmite...) performance on Friday, and by the Foo Fighters' storming closing set 24 hours later, the main talking point has been about a somewhat scruffy grandfather, once regarded as a member of the Labour Party's awkward squad, quoting peace, love and Shelley, and who just lost an election. Politics, eh?