Jeremy Corbyn sat at his desk, flicking through a copy of the Morning Star and daydreaming about the imminent collapse of global capitalism. Just another day in Labour HQ, until Jez noticed the date: 12th September 2016, a year since his landslide victory in the leadership election. He’d celebrate later by splashing out – maybe buy some bubbly on the way home. No, he chided himself. Too extravagant; maybe a packet of custard creams instead. And they better be Fairtrade.

Still, he mused, the last year had been something worth celebrating. For a start, he’d managed to hold on to his position. That certainly hadn’t been easy, especially that time at the Party Conference when Liz Kendall abseiled down in combat gear during his speech, wielding an AK-47 and screaming ‘viva privatisation!’ until she was escorted out kicking and screaming about how ‘right’ she was. At least now she limited herself to petulantly throwing scrunched-up paper at the back of his head during PMQs.

The conference had definitely been a highlight. He’d added an extra day onto proceedings, called #ThrowbackThursday (his media wonks assured him this was ‘really cool’ and ‘down with the kids’). Clause Four had been reinstated into the party constitution and the party renamed New Old Labour to symbolise its progress towards recapturing its past values.

Even better, he’d managed to airbrush the party’s history so it no longer included He Who Must Not Be Named. You know, that bloke who led the party to three decisive majorities and enacted major progressive reforms. What an idiot – how could the Labour Party have been distracted by something as unimportant as electoral success on its path to socialist utopia?

All in all, the party had held together pretty well this last year. Apart from Liz running off to a three-bed detached suburban London hideaway and attempting to instigate a guerrilla warfare campaign against him, the right of the party had more or less fallen into line. Or they’d broken away and formed a new party, he could never quite remember. Oh no, that was 1981! Jeremy frowned; he'd recently started forgetting which decade it was. Never mind, time was only a capitalist construct created by the bourgeoisie in order to discredit the eternal immutability of Marxist ideology.

Another highlight had been taking up his invitation to speak at the Cambridge Union. The chamber had been packed, despite an attempt by the student Conservative Association to picket the event. Apparently, they’d embraced a ‘No Platform’ policy in response to the Union no longer being a safe space for right-wing students after he’d referred to them as “a bunch of trust-fund Tory twats”. And he thought that was fairly civil of him…

The speech itself was an absolute corker. He’d told the assembled students that if they didn’t like the Union leadership, the answer was simple: get them to make membership three quid and then make all your mates sign up in time for the next election! It went down a storm with the assembled lefty masses, staring adoringly at him with their charity shop jumpers, pin badges and flasks of green tea.

But no, he mused, now it was time to look forwards - to the next leadership election. Yes, that’s right: Jeremy had resigned the day before and was running again to be party leader. When asked why, he’d told the media that the last campaign had been so much fun he fancied doing it all over again.

This time, party membership was being sold at a two-for-one offer, with a special bonus vote if you traded in membership of another party to join Labour. The field was already packed: Andy Burnham was running again under the slogan ‘third time lucky’, Yvette Cooper had launched her campaign by sighing ‘oh, go on then’ and Chuka Umunna had spent the last week assuring everyone that ‘I won’t quit this time, I promise’. Even Boris Johnson had thrown his hat into the ring, declaring that “they let that Tory Liz Kendall run last time, so why not me?”

Jeremy smirked. Yes, his re-election was looking virtually certain, but it was more than that. For all that hype about him being ‘unelectable’, ‘radical’ and ‘backwards’, the unthinkable was happening. It was looking like Corbyn might just have a chance of winning in 2020. And after all that had happened in the last year, that still seemed to most people to be the biggest surprise of all.