‘Our time has come at long last’ – Corbyn supporters celebrate

Being on the winning side has left Edmund Kelly, a long-time left-wing activist from Reading, feeling a little disconcerted. His initial instinct on hearing it confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn had won by a landslide was euphoria, followed instantly by unease.

That's what decades of losing does to you, Kelly says as he stands in the sunshine outside the Queen Elizabeth conference centre, waiting for the new Labour Party leader to emerge.

“I’ve been a socialist for 30 years. We have always lost,” he says. “But I don’t yet feel like I’m on the winning side. I feel like now we’ve got a battle.”

His chief concern is the pressure that Corbyn could come under from within. Most Labour MPs opposed the veteran left-winger, and Kelly fears the incoming leader may be nudged away from his core policy positions. The scale of the Islington North MP's triumph gives him a strong mandate, however, and Kelly can't wait to see the new leader, with "his eloquence and brilliance", confront David Cameron across the floor of the House of Commons each week.

As supporters waited for the victorious Corbyn to emerge from the conference centre (he ended up slipping out a side door, perhaps to avoid the press), the scene was one of celebration, delight and – for all that opinion polls that gave them hope in recent weeks – barely concealed shock.

Nicky Adams, who works with a community organisation and joined a trade union so that she could vote for Corbyn as an affiliated member, declares herself "astonished" that he won.

"I'm absolutely thrilled," she says. "We feel like our time has come at long last. All those people that opposed the Iraq war, opposed austerity, that never had a voice, this is our chance. We're determined to stay together, keep the momentum going."

Around us, chants rise from the crowd. "The people, united, will never be defeated," they call. When former mayor of London Ken Livingstone arrives, they go wild. "Ken, Ken, Ken!"

Adams says two issues were particularly important to her: decriminalising sex work and humane treatment of asylum seekers. On both Corbyn was “solid”. But her attachment to his platform goes further.

“I’m always going to know that how I felt all those years, when I saw nothing representing me in parliament, loads of other people felt like me. You can’t take that away from people. You feel like one of many, and that feels like massive encouragement… I think things have really changed fundamentally.”

For Luis Rivas, another proud self-proclaimed Corbynista who works in health administration in London, the 66-year-old's appeal was his apparent sincerity and ordinariness.

“While other politicians are sitting in their nice comfy seats in parliament, he’s out there supporting just causes – hospitals getting shut and things like that. I’ve seen him at many rallies and protests,” Rivas says. “He has convictions and beliefs. The main thing is that he’s one of us.”

Corbyn’s critics see him as an unelectable liability who will struggle to reach beyond the left and win support in the middle ground where elections are won and lost. His supporters see it differently, arguing that his success could revise basic assumptions about the electorate.

“This country has become effectively a one-party system. Blair’s Labour is almost like a pseudo-Tory party,” says Rivas. “How do we know that all those people who don’t vote don’t vote because they are disillusioned with the Labour Party?”

Kelly dismisses the charge that Corbyn is unelectable but says the new leader’s concern is “not with winning, it’s with building – building a grassroots movement.”

But building to what end? Power, surely? “Of course. But he never wanted to be a leader. He was thrust into this and begged to do it by his colleagues.”

Nicky Adams, a red Corbyn sticker affixed to her forehead, believes the result marks the end of Blairism, leaving its centrist programme “dead and buried” as a political project.

“I think the Tories are going to get a big run for their money because, now, what Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign showed is that there is a massive groundswell of people who do feel strongly about a whole set of crucial issues, starting with austerity and resentment that people are being made to pay for a crisis that was not of our making.”

These are not niche ideas, she says; they’re mainstream. “If this can happen in a few weeks, then we don’t know what’s going to happen between now and the next general election…

“Labour didn’t lose because it was too left-wing or not Tory enough. It lost because it didn’t stand for anything.”