Well, no one said it would be easy. In the past 48 hours, Jeremy Corbyn has suffered the worst press any new political leader has suffered in modern times and I include Michael Foot in that. He was highly regarded as a parliamentarian, and even a unifier, before he became Labour leader in 1980.

Mr Corbyn is regarded as the spawn of Satan. It's not just the beard and the bike. The Labour leader has been cast as a sexist, anti-Semitic pacifist who's friendly with Hamas and gives top jobs to people who think the IRA were right to bomb Britain.

The Conservatives have fired off attack adverts claiming that he is a “threat to national security” because of his views on Nato and Trident. We haven't seen a Labour leader vilified in quite this way since the days of the forged Zinoviev letter that triggered the fall of the first Labour government in 1924.

More Labour-friendly commentators like Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer damn Mr Corbyn with faint praise as a "decent man who would share his last sandwich", before dismissing him as an incompetent, divisive political fantasist who wants to take Britain back to the days of class war and hasn't the faintest idea of how to win elections.

Some of that is probably fair comment. Few political analysts believe a left- wing Labour leader could win a general election in England. Opinion polls all seem to indicate that Mr Corbyn's image is profoundly unpopular with swing voters, if not all of his policies. His chances of winning the 2020 General Election seem practically non existent.

But that isn't the end of the matter. The sheer intensity of the media barrage may blow back on its perpetrators. The last time we saw the UK press in full attack mode was during the independence referendum and that didn't stop 1.6 million Scots voting Yes.

Press criticism didn't stop Mr Corbyn winning the Labour leadership by a greater margin than Tony Blair.

Looking at Mr Corbyn’s social media statistics, you begin to see why he seems indifferent to the headlines. According to TheySay, a social media analysis tool developed by Oxford University, Mr Corbyn's leadership announcement on Saturday generated a 90 per cent positive sentiment rating in an analysis of more than 270,000 tweets.

Dr Karo Moilanen, co founder of TheySay, told me: “Mr Corbyn's positivity ratings, which almost resemble the levels of religious fervour typically seen around Apple products, have been nothing short of remarkable this week”.

Of course, that may change as the press continues to vilify him for wanting, allegedly, to abolish the British army and for saying that the death of Osama bin Laden was “a tragedy”. But there is a danger that, when sections of the press gets into this kind of feeding frenzy, people stop listening.

Actually, Mr Corbyn's gender balanced cabinet isn't nearly as Trotskyist as has been claimed. It has leadership rival Andy Burnham as shadow home secretary, the europhile Hilary Benn (Tony's New Labour son) as shadow foreign secretary and Tony Blair's one-time mentor, Lord Falconer, as Lord Chancellor.

Many thought Angela Eagle should have been made shadow chancellor on gender grounds alone. She is a former treasury minister. But it's hardly surprising that Mr Corbyn wanted his comrade in arms, John McDonnell, since it has to be someone who shares his rarified views on "the people's quantitative easing [QE]".

Mr McDonnell says he is not a “deficit denier” and intends to cut debt by attacking tax evasion and making the economy grow. The "peoples QE" has few friends. But there are a number of commentators like Martin Wolf in the Financial Times who've been arguing that you can't “cut your way to growth” and that austerity has failed.

It seems unlikely that anyone is going to support Mr McDonnell's views on the IRA, however. In 2003 he made some very unfortunate remarks which appeared to applaud the people who used “bombs and bullets” to force the UK to the conference table.

It is fair to say that there were two sides to the Irish civil war and even that the unification of Ireland is a just cause. But it seems inconceivable that any serious politician could even obliquely condone the IRA'a bombing of civilians.

Some newspapers and the Tory opposition won't rest until Mr McDonnell is relieved of his cabinet post along with left wingers such as Dianne Abbot as shadow development secretary.

And at the centre of the cyclone, mild-mannered Jeremy Corbyn is apparently unconcerned that he is about to suffer the most intense scrutiny of his public and private life. Perhaps he knows something we don't.