The shock of defeat has brought Blairites, Brownites and others stubbornly immune to Corbynmania together in search of a new big idea. Can they find a way out of the wilderness – even if it means a definitive break with Tony Blair’s toxic brand?

It is not perhaps how John Woodcock hoped to spend his autumn. But the man who ran Liz Kendall’s campaign for the Labour leadership was in rural Belgium last week, visiting the site of the Battle of Waterloo as part of his masters in international relations. Like many on his wing of the party, lately he has found himself with time on his hands.

But he won’t, he swears, be filling it with a war on Jeremy Corbyn. The two men have clashed publicly on Trident – shipyard jobs in Woodcock’s Barrow-in-Furness constituency depend on its renewal – but he sounds less like an insurgent than a man grappling with a disconcerting new world order. “I think we have to accept reality, and be seen to accept reality,” he sighs, when asked what the 90% of the parliamentary party who didn’t want Corbyn as leader should do now. “But when things are just beyond the pale, we say so or it would just look absurd. That’s the balance we have to strike.”

It is hard to know what to call the bits of the Labour system stubbornly immune to Corbynmania. “Blairites” won’t wash, since the shock of defeat has if anything brought the old Brown and Blair camps together. (Commons tearooms have been buzzing lately with conversations between people barely on speaking terms for years). “Moderates” sounds too boring, “The Resistance” – a nickname adopted by some around Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna – too excitable, especially for the significant rump of Labour MPs who just want a quiet life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Labour membership would react violently to any attempts to oust Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Rob Stothard/Getty Images

Nobody’s seriously plotting a coup, for the simple reason there is no point. Behind Corbyn are hundreds of thousands of party members who believe in what he stands for, are thrilled to hear it voiced openly, and would replace him with another leftwinger if he fell under a bus tomorrow. “We could turn around tomorrow and get rid of Jeremy Corbyn but the membership would react violently,” says a longstanding Labour aide. “Jeremy needs to be able to do his thing, and if that fails people may change their minds. But they’ve got to fail – or succeed, who knows? – on their own terms.”

That doesn’t, however, mean nothing’s happening. The recent suspension of new Corbyn aide Andrew Fisher – under investigation over old tweets apparently praising leftwing rivals to at least two Labour parliamentary candidates – marks one small victory for the unbelievers. They cleaned up, too, in recent elections to the party’s admittedly obscure backbench parliamentary policy committees. The vitriolic social media against anyone criticising Corbyn makes many MPs nervous of discussing their plans on the record, but two clear themes are emerging.

Jeremy Corbyn speaks to shadow cabinet over party discipline after Trident row Read more

One is a strategic decision not to attack Corbyn himself – as one former frontbencher puts it, he’s still at “that stage of things bouncing off him” – but his links to a resurgent hard left instead, since that frightens even some of his supporters. Supporters of Kendall, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper are increasingly merging into one broad camp but, says one former Cooper supporter: “I wouldn’t define it as Corbynites versus non-Corbynites. I’d say it’s hard left versus not hard left.”

But the second argument is a more controversial one about what the right can learn from the revolution against it; and whether, if they can’t beat the new politics, they should try to join the game.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Burnham: badly hurt by defeat. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

Losing hit Burnham visibly harder than the other leadership candidates, perhaps because it was the second time in a row. Ambitions crushed, the former red-hot favourite now keeps a low profile as shadow home secretary (if anything, it is his former campaign manager Michael Dugher who is being tipped now as an outside future bet).

Kendall, having come a distant fourth, has taken perhaps the most time out to reflect but is increasingly ready to rejoin the fray. Friends say she has concluded that the moderates became fatally trapped in defending their record in government, offering too few exciting ideas for the future; she is planning a book on the future of progressive politics and a project on wooing the so-called “silver majority”, older voters who may form half the electorate by 2020.

But it is Cooper who has bounced back most vigorously. Fresh from a trip to examine how the Greek island of Lesbos is managing a tide of Syrian refugee boats, she was campaigning this week to stop abortion law being devolved to Scotland and is deep in talks with the tech industry about tackling misogynistic abuse on social media. She is regarded as the only one of the three conceivably capable of running again – but only if Corbyn, who has hinted that at 66 he might not want to do a full term, steps down unexpectedly early. “I can’t see how in two years’ time a candidate who was beaten before, and who was in government from 2000-2010, is the answer,” says a friend. Hopes are inevitably shifting towards a younger generation: not just Hunt and Umunna but Rachel Reeves (currently on maternity leave) or the former soldier Dan Jarvis, who ruled himself out on family grounds last time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yvette Cooper: bouncing back. Photograph: Mark Thomas/REX Shutterstock/Mark Thomas/Rex Shutterstock

But for now, the unbelievers are bothered less about looking for generals and more about battling for survival. What lies ahead is a long, grim period of trench warfare: defending moderate MPs and councillors from deselection, tussling for control of obscure bits of party machinery – and keeping a watchful eye on the Corbynite grassroots movement Momentum, which many MPs regard as a sort of vigilante army to be mobilised against unbelievers.

It sounds faintly paranoid when Corbyn is forever vowing to open up debate. But moderates remain wary, fearful that the left is just waiting until it has moved enough of its people into dominant positions to impose its will. “I suspect a lot of the political retreats are tactical retreats; you change the organisation, you come back,” says a former shadow minister.

And that is why the mailing list for Labour First, a previously obscure ginger group that even its secretary Luke Akehurst admits was never “where the cool kids hang out”, has quadrupled since summer. It has become an impromptu rallying point for streetfighters and backroom fixers from different wings of the party united only by a desire to keep the hard left’s hands off the party machine (September’s party conference decision not to have a vote on Trident renewal was one of its early successes).

“We’re not interested in being disloyal; our gut instinct is to be loyal to whoever’s the Labour leader,” says Akehurst. “But we have our red lines and Trident is the obvious one that we think is fundamental to any chance of Labour being taken seriously. We also don’t want the rule book mucked around with.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jeremy Corbyn: open to debate. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

But as Akehurst points out, organising alone isn’t enough unless what used to be Labour’s mainstream can match what he calls the “moral attractiveness” of Corbynism. “In the same way he brought in all these new people, we need candidates and policies and ideologies that can inspire hundreds of thousands of people. We’ve somehow got ourselves boxed into this technocratic corner, where people say: ‘They’re boring, they haven’t said anything new since the 90s, they’re just about making tough decisions and being miserable.’”

The lesson many draw from this summer is that far from sounding progressive, the moderates had begun to look dangerously old-fashioned, failing to recognise that the world had changed since the crash. Or as Hunt puts it: “We’re still dealing with the aftermath of the crash and of austerity and the lack of a big compelling idea about how social democracy works today.”

The bewildering array of new thinktanks and talking shops sprouting on the left – from Jon Cruddas’s Labour Together to Hunt and Umunna’s Labour for the Common Good – is a first stab at such an intellectual renewal. But there is a growing anxiety on the right that shiny new policies won’t be enough, unless the right faces some harsh truths about why it was so overwhelmingly rejected. “Nobody has the answer on this yet,” says a former shadow minister. “But there’s no route to a different approach that does not run through convincing members it’s what they actually want.”

Liam Byrne was a cabinet minister under Blair and backed Cooper for leader; hardly the man you would expect to declare neoliberalism dead. But he in effect did so in a speech last Wednesday, seen as an experiment in reconnecting with thousands of often instinctively moderate Labour members who found the mainstream candidates bloodless and uninspiring.

“It’s a shame it had to be like this, but Jeremy’s election has roused the party after 20 years. I think what it does is force my wing of the party to comprehensively re-evaluate and recapture the argument about inequality,” says a surprisingly chirpy Byrne, who thinks there is also “a huge community in business getting interested in this”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blairites and and Brownites are learning to bury their differences. Photograph: Stephen Hird / Reuters/Reuters

Cruddas’s observation that the voters Labour needs to win back are economically radical but fiscally conservative – keen to see capitalism reformed and wealth gaps closed, but pro-austerity – has got MPs thinking about marrying the popular bits of Milibandism with something more economically credible. And one obvious lesson of the Corbyn spring is that new economic thinking bubbles up from the bottom of a party as well as trickling down from the top.

Hence a sudden surge of interest in city mayors and super-powered council leaders such as Manchester’s Sir Richard Leese – or Sadiq Khan, if he can succeed Boris Johnson in London – now struggling for creative answers to an era of ever deeper cuts.

“Some of our councillors are doing brilliant things that are an antidote sometimes to the Westminster reality,” says Alison McGovern, the Wirral South MP and new chair of the centrist thinktank Progress. “They’re having to come up with ways to pay the living wage in care homes, say – and they’re doing it, they’re figuring it out.”

They may also be the moderates’ best hope of getting across the idea that there is nothing morally dubious about wanting to get elected, or to do things rather than talk.

“I’m proud of being pragmatic,” says McGovern. “It’s because I feel things in my heart that we have to try and get things done. My constituents will judge me on whether or not I manage to get the boarded-up shopping centre sorted out or deal with anti-social behaviour, not whether I’ve written a nice article. If there’s something [Progress] have to offer it’s making sure the Labour party is connected with that pragmatic attitude.” She loathes, she says, feeling powerless to help struggling constituents: “I feel really bad that young people are now going through what I went through.”

But even baby steps like this raise difficult questions about how far the moderates should go in meeting a radicalised party membership halfway. Some close to Tony Blair are already urging a more aggressive defence of what he and New Labour stood for, a view characterised by one of those lobbied as “these wimps, they’re not doing anything”.

But the backlash against his public interventions in the leadership contest this summer brought home to serving Blairites both how toxic his brand has become for some, and how irrelevant it will increasingly be to a coming generation of voters who barely remember him in office. Some wonder if it is time to go further in explicitly acknowledging a break with the past, especially on the economy. One leading Blairite points to David Cameron’s public disowning of Margaret Thatcher’s famous (if misquoted) line that there is no such thing as society as a possible model for a gentle, symbolic distancing from the master.

But for Hunt, it is less a question of breaking with Blair than acknowledging that times move on. “One of the unfortunate mistakes of the last parliament was not a strong enough defence of Labour’s record in office, which provided the template for all that ‘we never achieved anything’ stuff,” he says. “My view is that the Labour government of 1997-2010 needs to be seen in historical context as a great progressive reforming government, but it needs to be history; the notion that you do all of that again is for the birds. Tony was elected 20 years ago as leader. We regard that period in office as we regard Wilson, Callagahan and Attlee; part of the great heritage.” The future of the brand, however, remains anyone’s guess.

• This article was amended on 13 November 2015. An earlier version referred incorrectly to “September’s party conference vote to keep Trident”.