The Labour Party’s leadership contenders may have radically different ideas for the party’s future. But they share at least one belief: Jeremy Corbyn’s closest aides, Karie Murphy and Seumas Milne, are culpable for the party’s catastrophic general election result.

Like Corbyn, neither Murphy, a Scottish former nurse, nor Milne, a Winchester and Oxford-educated journalist, was prepared to quit immediately after the defeat. And the presence at headquarters of the architects of the doomed election campaign is fuelling such resentment that it threatens to stymie the left as it seeks to “win the debate” on where the party goes next.

Last week, Corbyn aides even discussed removing Murphy by giving her a peerage on the dissolution honours list — a suggestion that provoked fury among Labour