The auditions are about to start for the man or woman who can save the Labour Party. The saviour sought will need an appeal that extends beyond the narrow tribe gathered at the conference. He or she will have to identify and embody a new start, to allow the party to leave its current travails behind. The aching for direction, not offered by the stuttering incumbent, is palpable; senior people in the Labour Party long for leadership in private. They are desperately hoping that the Conservative Party can supply it.

This is now the pass that the Labour loyalists on the right of the party, the Tom Watson gang, have arrived at. They cannot depose Mr Corbyn yet they know he would be an