For the first time in a lifetime of political analysis, I find myself lost for words. Nothing I write can do justice to the calamity that Britain's Labour Party has just inflicted on itself. The best I can do, to give you a sense of the man newly elected as Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, is to summarize some of his opinions.

Jeremy Corbyn is happy to talk to Irish Republican Army men, avowed anti-Semites and Hezbollah militants; but he refuses "out of principle" to talk to the Sun newspaper, a right-wing tabloid.

He campaigns for the national rights of Venezuelans and Palestinians; but he opposes self-determination in Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands.

He'd like to admit as many Syrian refugees as possible, but is curiously ambivalent about why they became refugees in the first place, telling RT that Assad's chemical attacks may have been a Western hoax.

He is relaxed about Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon, but he can't stand the idea of Britain having one.

He says taxpayers should be able to opt out of funding the military, but not out of funding trade unions.

He wants to re-open coal mines that have been uneconomical since the 1960s; yet, oddly, he wants to wean us off fossil fuels.

He can't even unequivocally condemn the Islamic State without adding a "but…" to the effect that America shouldn't have been in Iraq.

He is, in short, happy to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it is sufficiently anti-British and anti-American.

Jeremy Corbyn, whose steady and surprising march to victory runs parallel to Sen. Bernie Sanders' unexpected success in the Democratic presidential race, is a shambling, self-righteous repository of every second-rate, lazy, 1960s Marxist nostrum. And Labour's activists can't get enough of him. They haven't just picked the lowest card in the deck; they have slammed it belligerently on the table, giving Corbyn 59.5 percent of the votes in a four-candidate race. Fifty-nine point five percent for a man who has never held any office, who has spent 30 years rebelling against his party, and whose speaking style makes Ron Paul look like a mesmerising demagogue.

Corbyn's victory speech was a precursor of what is to come. He might have tried to reach out, to be emollient, to reassure voters that not everything they read about him was true. Instead, he ran through some Leftist boilerplate about inequality punctuated by repeated attacks on the media.

His supporters lapped it up, but Labour moderates are in despair. Many of the party's senior figures have already declared that they won't serve under Corbyn, and there is a real chance that they will break away, forming a rival Center-Left party and thus, under Britain's first-past-the-post system, giving the Conservative Party a decade of easy election wins.

The Conservatives, for their part, are understandably jubilant. Too jubilant, indeed. All governing parties need a credible opposition. Without one, they become cocky, complacent and often corrupt.

This may seem a strange thing to say, coming from a Conservative politician, but I feel a real pang of sorrow at the passing of Labour, which has been our chief rival for office these past 90 years.

In truth, we were luckier than many countries in the temper of our leftist party. Across most of Europe, the radical tradition was bloodthirsty and destructive. Leftist parties wanted a revolution which would be complete, as one slogan had it, "only when the last king has been strangled with the entrails of the last priest."

Labour, by contrast, was more concerned with building up the poor than with tearing down the rich. As one of its senior figures put it, the party "owes more to Methodism than to Marxism." It was an astute observation. The Labour Party came out of a broader movement concerned with encouraging self-help among the poor. It had its roots in colliery brass bands, in the temperance movement, in working men's libraries. At its best, it constituted a genuine national movement, and was able, with justice, to refer to itself as "the People's Party."

That story is over now. The People's Party has given up on the People. It lost the last election because most voters, at least outside Scotland, saw it as way too far to the left. Instead of trying to accommodate the concerns of the electorate, it has doubled down, veering completely away from the mainstream and, in effect, inviting voters to like it or lump it.

Here's a sobering statistic. There have been seven Labour leaders since 1976. Six of the seven failed to win a single general election. As for the seventh, Tony Blair, he is now so loathed in his own party that his advice not to back Corbyn contributed, as even Blair admits, to Corbyn's landslide.

Don't worry about Corbyn. The honest, narrow-minded, pious old duffer won't be around long. But spare a thought for the party of Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee. What a wretched way to end.

Dan Hannan is a British Conservative MEP.