They claim to be soul-searching in a much-needed period of reflection following the hammer-blow of a fourth, and most emphatic, electoral defeat in less than a decade.

But what Labour people are really caught up in this bleak midwinter is not a search but a battle for the soul of the party, one which will define and shape the future of Left-of-centre politics for a generation.

In a spectacularly ill-advised choice, Ed Miliband, the last failed leader but one, is among a panel invited by the Labour Together group to tour the country to figure out how the party got this last election so badly wrong. The inquiry includes a series of “listening events” with defeated candidates, activists and voters. It is not clear that anyone – least of all the contestants running to succeed Jeremy Corbyn in Mr Miliband’s old job – are prepared to hear what they will have to say.

The panel is expected to report back around mid-February. By then, the leadership contest will be well under way.

The party’s ruling National Executive Committee (NEC), stuffed like a goose with Corbyn loyalists, has not yet decreed the exact set of rules it will be conducted under, but one thing is certain: they will be framed to ensure maximum benefit to candidates who speak and think like the bed-blocking incumbent, the man who rigged the current NEC so it is more a Corbynista ventriloquist's dummy than an independent source of power within the party.