REUTERS The Labour Party hates the topic of leadership

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The Labour Party hates the topic of leadership. Worse than that, it doesn’t understand it. Leftism posits we are equal. No one is indispensable. To think otherwise leads us to infantile hero worship, or worse, tyranny. This blind spot in Labour’s vision of politics means that whenever leadership issues arise, and they do all the time, they immediately become crises because it doesn’t know what leadership is, doesn’t want to know and doesn’t like it – so doesn’t know what it entails.

The whole issue is compounded for Labour with the emergence of celebrity politics which, again, it hates. Tony Blair is the best recent example of knowing how to perform a character: regular guy, moderniser, decisive, in-touch with national sentiment. What the Labour Party has always done to cope with the very real issue of leadership has been to apply a series of simplistic character traits, usually negative, to the party leaders; the treacherous (MacDonald, Blair); the idealistic (Hardie, Henderson, Foot); the not up to it – though good and decent (Foot again, Miliband, Corbyn) and so on.

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Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership election in 2015 not because he was Left-wing but because he fired people’s imagination and created a stampede of excited support. Then he stopped. And that is why we are where we are today. Ironically, he stopped performing at the moment of his victory. His victory speech was in direct contrast to his style throughout the campaign. We are now in an age of the politics of leadership performance. Those now trying to unseat Jeremy Corbyn would themselves do well to heed this.

AFP • GETTY In the Conservative leadership race it is clear that Theresa May has already understood this