“THE Labour Party is a bit like an old stagecoach. If you drive it along at a rapid rate everyone aboard is either so exhilarated or seasick that you do not have a lot of difficulty.” So argued Harold Wilson, a Labour prime minister, adding: “But if you stop, everybody gets out and argues about where to go next.” The mantra has held for much of the party’s history. Yet today, when it is in peril as almost never before, Labour’s problem is not that everyone is arguing but that they are rallying around a flawed consensus.

That much was made clear by the official account of Labour’s unexpectedly poor result in the general election in May. Written by Margaret Beckett, a former foreign secretary, the report of the Learning the Lessons from Defeat Taskforce (nothing is taken seriously in Labour unless lots of capital letters are involved) pointed to various causes. Party bigwigs duly praised the document. Among the factors it cited were a hostile media and the Conservative Party’s accusation that Labour might do a coalition deal with the secessionist Scottish National Party.

Both were valid points, yet the report appeared to minimise the two most convincing explanations for Labour’s defeat: the unpopularity of its then-leader, Ed Miliband, and the lack of trust in the party on the economy. The impression of selective accounting was strengthened when Deborah Mattinson, a former Labour pollster, accused Dame Margaret of overlooking polling from marginal seats like Croydon and Nuneaton.

These polls made it clear that Labour failed to disabuse voters of the notion that the party had caused the financial crash, could not run the economy and had a leader incapable of being prime minister. They stressed that Labour needed to appeal to “middle-class voters, not just down-and-outs”, and that having an apparently “weak and bumbling leader” did not help. Ms Mattinson called the final report, in which such concerns were skated over, a “whitewash”.

In Jeremy Corbyn the party now has a leader who accentuates both of the weaknesses which, evidence suggests, lost the party the election. Yet it is acting as if Dame Margaret’s ruling was, in fact, rather harsh. MPs remain nominally loyal to Mr Corbyn. Even those who wax suicidal about their predicament refuse to act (for now, at least). Talk of a leadership bid by Michael Dugher, a former shadow cabinet minister, was recently greeted with derision. Labour is a party in denial. Lucky David Cameron.