Rosa Prince at Winchester Speakers' Festival

He is a most unlikely revolutionary: a middle-aged, middle-class former grammar schoolboy who honed his radicalism on the mean streets of rural Shropshire. Until recently, Jeremy Corbyn was barely known outside political circles. Yet last summer he rode a wave of popular enthusiasm to win the Labour Party leadership by a landslide, with a greater mandate than any British political leader before him. The thought of being leader was initially said to terrify him. So how did this very British iconoclast manage to snatch the leadership of a party he spent forty years rebelling against?

From Corbyn’s cosy rural upbringing, through three marriages – including his decision to divorce one wife for sending their son to grammar school – and his long espousal of contentious causes, from Irish Republicanism and a free Palestine to opposition to military action in Syria and Iraq, Prince tells his story.

Rosa Prince is an award-winning political journalist and was in the team that broke the 2009 expenses scandal. She was also US correspondent for the Telegraph.

A Q&A session will follow.

Tickets are available here.