He can’t say he wasn’t warned. Last summer, with Jeremy Corbyn on course for a Leicester City-style upset in the Labour leadership race, a member of his campaign team shared a confidence.
Corbyn had a problem; a Jewish problem. “He’s got to tackle it now,” the source said. “He can’t let it simmer. I’ve told him but he won’t listen.”
It was a rare moment of disquiet during a heady summer for the left. Corbyn’s overnight celebrity meant that socialism was suddenly cool again.
Giving disaffected Labour supporters permission to dream of the left-wing policies Tony Blair and his successors had claimed were electoral poison, he romped to victory.
Yet one group did not share the adulation. The Jewish community had long been wary of Mr Corbyn, remembering his history of fraternisation with Holocaust-deniers and Jew-haters. Such as his “friend” Paul Eisen, who has questioned whether Hitler was part of an official plan to kill Jews.
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And so, alarmed when Mr Corbyn shot up the opinion polls, the Jewish Chronicle posed him a series of questions. Team Corbyn failed to respond for seven days, and, when the answers finally came, they were terse and in the third person.
Broadly put, his office insisted that Jeremy deplored the Holocaust and simply believed in holding a dialogue with all sides. The row was a minor off note in the symphony that was his capture of the party.
To their credit, one of the more perceptive members of his campaign team urged him to use his honeymoon period to build bridges. It didn’t happen. Eight months on, the antisemitism row has blown up to the extent that it threatens not only his leadership but the entire Labour movement.
This article was amended on 26 May 2016 to remove a reference to Ibrahim Hewitt. A correction was published on 29 May 2016.
•Rosa Prince is author of Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup