American writer and “public intellectual” Noam Chomsky has insisted that Jeremy Corbyn won the 2017 general election in an "enormous victory."

In an interview with broadcaster Matt Chorley, Chomsky, 94, repeatedly insisted that Corbyn had been victorious in 2017, claiming he had won “an enormous victory”.

Chorley immediately said: “No, he didn’t”. But Chomsky repeated: “Yes, the biggest victory that Labour had won in generations.” No, said Chorley. “He lost. He didn’t become prime minister”.

But Chomsky, a long-standing hard-left campaigner and supporter of Corbyn, maintained that it was “the British establishment” — including The Times — which had “come down on [Corbyn] with a ton of bricks, with false, deceitful propaganda about antisemitism, all exposed as lies…”

Noam Chomsky claims Jeremy Corbyn won an “enormous victory” in the 2017 election.@MattChorley challenges him on the facts of Corbyn’s leadership
Tune to https://t.co/xhUnEXLqj5 from 10am 📻 pic.twitter.com/sL3unxScdE

— Times Radio (@TimesRadio) April 25, 2023

Matt Chorley responded: “That’s just not true. Labour MPs left the Labour Party because of antisemitism when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.” They had quit the party in protest at Corbyn’s record, he told Chomsky, including the leader’s support for anti-West positions. One such, he said, was Corbyn’s line “of giving Russia the benefit of the doubt over the Salisbury poisonings”.

Chomsky continued to insist that Corbyn had been attacked by the British media and claimed that the “Blairite wing” of the Labour Party had decided that “we do not want to lose our party, the party that we own, to this effort to develop a popular based party, working for working people and the poor, we don’t want to lose our party to that”. This line, Chomsky claimed, had been admitted as such “in the Labour files”.

A clearly appalled Chorley hit back: “They did not say they did not want a government that wanted to act for the poor. What they said was, they did not want their party to be led by a man with a track record of tolerating antisemitism in the Labour Party and taking anti-West positions.”