In a crisis there are always people saying something must be done. Most of their plans are worse than doing nothing. I’d like to have coined that maxim but I borrowed it from a former Downing Street adviser – someone who has seen first hand how the attraction of doing something drastic in politics conceals the risk of doing something stupid.

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The context was discussion of a new party. It isn’t hard to find this conversation in Westminster. It takes place whenever there is a gathering of two or more people who despair equally at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of Labour and Theresa May’s navigation of Brexit. It isn’t a plot: no one is recruiting MPs to some new force. But there is a lot of speculation that someone should.

The conversation begins with the thought that Labour is doomed. Corbyn’s closest allies insist he can still be prime minister, but with dwindling conviction. John McDonnell complains about conspiracies by MPs and the media, not because he fears a coup but because he needs one. It isn’t a coincidence that the Corbyn locomotive ran out of steam once Owen Smith’s leadership challenge was crushed. Battle against “Blairites” was the coal in the furnace. Without an internal enemy to fight, the wheels stop turning.

Labour MPs see how Corbyn fails faster when left to his own devices, so they practise reticence to accelerate his departure. A political archeologist looking for traces of the edifice that was once New Labour message discipline could extract it from the bitten lips of former ministers now on the backbench, repressing the urge to attack their leader. This tactical taciturnity is necessary because many Labour members still think Corbyn is doing well, and many who see him stumbling still agree with him. They blame things other than his opinions and actions for disappointing poll performances.

So even if MPs can hasten regime change, Corbyn’s replacement will end up being someone prepared to praise his legacy. The price of ditching the leader will be an absence of serious inquest into the reasons why he needed ditching in the first place. A spell of unity will be bought with deferral of arguments about markets, trade, defence, immigration, public sector reform and all the other issues that make Labour unity impossible to sustain for long.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Nicola Sturgeon is fast becoming the only opposition leader who might cost the prime minister sleep at night.’ Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA

Anticipating that saga, it is easy to plot a course ever deeper into irrelevance. That leaves the radical Tory right as the only dynamic force shifting May’s position; and Nicola Sturgeon as the only opposition leader who might cost the prime minister sleep at night. If British politics is not to be carved up by rival nationalisms – an English version cloaked in Brexit and the Scottish backlash – a third force is needed.

The Liberal Democrats do not have the capacity or goodwill in the country to scale their modest polling revival up into something more substantial. Leader Tim Farron is amiable but lacks the magnetic statesmanship that could recruit big beast defections from Labour or Tory benches.

So why not something new? On the face of it, there is a vacancy for a party of the centre, straddling the liberal wing of the Tory party and New Labour in exile – styled as a movement custom-built to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, when Corbyn and May are leading symmetrical retreats into dogmatic nostalgia of left and right.

That is the conversation that starts up whenever disillusioned Labour moderates and miserable pro-European Tories cross paths. It will get louder if Emmanuel Macron wins the French presidential elections this spring. The slick former minister, civil servant and investment banker pitches liberal internationalism as a rupture from the status quo. His En Marche! party was only created last year. So maybe the populist tide is turning …

But Macron’s surge is a peculiar product of France’s history and its presidential system. Britain’s electoral model suffocates infant parties and stunts the growth of small ones.

That is just one of the obstacles to a new centrist venture. Here are some others: Labour memories of the SDP adventure that prolonged their last sojourn in the wilderness; tribal Labour allegiance that makes even the most demoralised MPs want to fight to regain control of the party they love, no matter how long it takes; that same visceral loyalty forbidding alliance with other parties; lingering hope among liberal Tories that May will not abandon them completely.

Add to that the need for tens of millions in annual revenue for a new organisation; the need for members in every region and from every social class; the need for leaders who have a high profile but are not tarnished by past association with unloved governments; the need to avoid looking like a therapy group for embittered losers. A new movement will struggle to catch the popular imagination if its most famous patrons are Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, George Osborne and Nick Clegg.

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That is where the conversation always ends. Fixing a broken party looks impossible until you compare it to the challenge of starting a new one. No idea is so bad that it can’t be made temporarily appealing by a worse one.

So Labour dissenters put up with Corbyn and hope for something better one day. It isn’t a great plan. But for now it is the best bad idea they’ve got.