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As I turned the corner, I knew what I would see. It was written in the stars. My bus, shining in the distance, waiting to turn into the main road where I catch it. If only I had left home 15 seconds earlier...

And so I ran - sprinted even - gazelle-like, if you can imagine a gazelle with shin splints and wearing brogues and glasses. It was not really elegant, but it was effective. As long as the bus slowed down and stopped, as it would have done had I been at the bus stop, I would have reached the stop at the same time as the bus.

The bus did not slow down. It certainly did not stop. The driver must have seen me, the Red-faced, Four-eyed Gazelle-Man, tearing up the hill, arms waving like a semaphore enthusiast on 4x fast forward, ensuring that he did so.

Of course he had seen me. If he had not, he should not be in charge of a passenger-carrying vehicle. He should not be in charge of a go-kart.

As the bus chugged past me, at roughly 15 mph, I got a good look at the driver. He was wearing the half-smile of a man who knew he had just urinated on somebody's chips with the full backing of the regulations binding his job.

I could see that smug face half an hour later, when I was still boiling with fury and now late for work. It shocked me how angry I was. There was only one way I could get past this: turn my life into a metaphor for the Labour Party.

The Labour Party is still angry that it lost the General Election, even though it was partly its own fault for not getting to grips with things sooner. The smug bus driver is George Osborne, driving the bus that is David Cameron – and how easy it is to imagine Cameron's face on the front of a bus, Thomas the Tank Engine style.

It is so angry, it is in danger of losing its senses, lashing out at anybody who failed to vote Labour last time, and thinking that the only reason it didn't win was because it was not left wing enough, failing to realise that even if Labour had kept all its Scottish seats the Tories would still have a majority.

(Image: PA)

“An opposition should oppose,” they say. “Let's keep this anger going.” And they are right. The trouble is that if the opposition opposes everything, then there's a risk the electorate thinks it's so good at opposing things that it invites it to do it again at the next election.

When the Labour Party calms down, as it eventually must, it needs to realise that it's not really policies that win elections. It's not what's on the menu that is important, it's the chef.

One of my favourite movies about journalism, The Paper, understands this. In the film, hard-nosed news editor Michael Keaton says the only thing you need to gain access to any building is “a clipboard and a confident wave”. Labour needs to find that confidence. It needs a plausible manner.

Because the British public is not really ideological. It just wants to be reassured that whoever runs the country looks as if they know what they are doing and won't set the kitchen on fire.

The Tories right now have a plausible manner in bundles. Cameron has always looked like a Prime Minister from central casting. No matter how incompetent the government might be, it never looks it.

It is the same for the SNP up in Scotland. Their success is rooted not just in nationalism or their late conversion to socialism, but also in the fact that they look as if they know what they're doing. You could leave your cat with Nicola Sturgeon when you went on holiday and know it would still be alive when you came home.

Labour needs to be more like the Tories, not in policy, but in approach and presentation. It needs to show the Tories up as incompetent, not cruel, and take that plausible sheen away from them.

And it needs to elect a leader who looks like a Prime Minister to the country at large, not somebody who looks more at home in opposition. Or it will lose again in 2020, and it will be nobody's fault but the membership of the Labour Party.

And I need to leave the house 15 seconds earlier.

Read all of Gary's columns here