Another summer, another protracted Labour Party leadership contest. Last year, after being dismissed as a hard-left gesture, Jeremy Corbyn stormed to victory. During his unexpected surge, he came to Cambridge and spoke to 1,500 people at an overflowing Great St Mary’s church. On Friday, his challenger Owen Smith tried to follow in his footsteps.

Smith spoke on a warm, sunny evening to a packed room at the Cambridge Rugby Union Club, after being introduced by Cambridge’s Labour MP Daniel Zeichner. The roughly 250 attendees were far less in number than what Corbyn was pulling last year. They were also not all Smith supporters. One attendee heckled Smith, but the meeting was generally civil and chair Mary Nathan praised the “comradely” actions of all in the room.

There is a strong argument that Smith’s visit was futile. Corbyn is the runaway favourite, as the recent sweep for the left slate on the National Executive Committee elections attest.  A large number of Party members and figures on the British left are genuinely inspired by Corbyn, especially in a liberal-left city like Cambridge. He commands the support of many local trade unionists, Labour city councillors such as Kevin Price, and the former Lib Dem councillor Clare King.

Nevertheless, even in Cambridge Corbyn has lost support. The organiser of last year’s Great St Mary’s Corbyn rally, Dan Greef, now publicly supports Smith as the person who can “deliver the change that our country desperately needs”, and Cambridge University student Luke Warner, who spoke at that meeting, has switched support to the Welsh MP.

A key turning point was the EU referendum, which Smith repeatedly returned to in his speech. He said, on the morning of June 24th that “I felt angry that we hadn’t fought harder”, and criticised Corbyn for saying Article 50 should be triggered immediately.

Given Smith’s outsider status, I asked him before his speech about Corbyn’s enthusiastic support. I also asked whether his own campaign could reach out to young people, given that the national committee of Young Labour recently endorsed Jeremy.

“Definitely...I’m unashamedly a socialist. I’m unashamedly an idealist.” He added that “the only difference between Jeremy and myself is that I think I’ve got more practical set of ideas” about how to “make Britain great again.”

“I’ve put forward more policies and more ideas than Jeremy has done in eleven months,” he later argued in his speech.

Left-wing buzzwords permeated Smith’s rhetoric. He has to pitch to the instincts of Labour’s membership, most of whom voted Corbyn last year. He plans to rewrite Clause IV of the party’s constitution (again), placing inequality at the centre, and argued during his speech to appreciative laughs that Jeremy was not “the only socialist in the village”. He even quoted the Marxist theorist Raymond Williams. Smith’s left-wing pitch resonated, and he received a standing ovation.

Yet this contest, like last year, has exposed a considerable amount of acrimony, from threats of deselection of rebel MPs to denunciations of alleged Trotskyist entryists by Deputy Leader Tom Watson. After Watson’s comments, I asked Smith whether he was the “next Neil Kinnock” who would pioneer a fresh round of Militant expulsion. He flatly denied this: “I think most of the people who have joined the Labour Party have joined it for exactly the same reasons I have.”

It’s clear that the party is in a torrid state. This contest follows a highly incendiary vote of no-confidence taken by the Parliamentary Labour Party. Nevertheless, Smith disputed my suggestion that a backroom coup triggered this contest, saying that was a “social media narrative...I think what happened was a lot of people collectively lost faith in Jeremy, didn’t feel like he could lead the party...[and] translate those principles into government.”

Despite Smith’s claims, pro-Corbyn city councillor Dave Baigent was less impressed. He told me after the event that the Welsh MP was “polished”, and that if he won then he would “not destroy the Labour Party”, but he “wouldn’t buy a used car” from him. Smith, Baigent argued, was leader of a group of MPs who were setting “comrade against comrade” and ignoring the democratic will of the members.

While Smith was placing principles and policies at the forefront, the audience kept returning to electability. Local A-level student and Smith supporter Georgie Howarth baldly said to Varsity: “I just don’t think Corbyn is electable.” On his part, Smith’s central pitch turned on a claim that he could “translate principles into power”, warning the audience that Labour “had no God given right to exist”.

This visceral fear of electoral oblivion has led to an unusually broad coalition of Party factions supporting Smith, from right and left. These are not natural alliances, a fact exposed during the event. At one point Smith colourfully dismissed proportional representation as “giving a leg-up to fascists”, which incited both cheers and discontented mutterings.

Even if Smith is right, the Party’s post-Blair woes mean that it is still facing an acute crisis. Labour also has structural problems to solve, such as its inability to select female candidates for prominent positions which MPs such as Jess Phillips have highlighted. More pressingly, regardless of the ragtag pro-Smith coalition it’s clear that many members are supporting Corbyn to the hilt. The betting markets predict another clear Corbyn victory in September.

Those who say Corbyn’s politics are the future could be right, and Smith supporters may be wrong. However, it’s undeniable that Labour’s polling performance under Corbyn has been terrible, hitting historic lows against an often divided and divisive government, despite erroneous claims to the contrary. There is strong evidence Corbyn’s message, a blending of a rejuvenated Bennism, single-issue politics and left-wing critique, is on a totally different wavelength to the country at large.

Smith told me, in no uncertain terms, that he will win this contest. If he’s right, it would be an upset almost as big as Jeremy’s victory last year. If the predictions of another Corbyn sweep are correct, then Smith may simply join another Welshman in raging against the dying of the light.

@colm_m