No one will be happier than I if centrists take back control of the Left. But they will fail

This is not going to plan. It was never my intention that my resignation from the Labour Party after 34 years should become part of the anti-Semitism row that has engulfed it. My hopes of dispatching my party card to the waste bin in a “below the radar” manoeuvre was confounded by a friend in whom I had unwisely confided, who then tipped off a journalist.

It made no difference to the screaming hordes of online Corbynistas that I refused to be drawn on my reasons for quitting: this was a personal decision that made me feel somewhat bereaved, was the line I stuck to. This, of course, went unnoticed by the hard Left, who used Twitter over the weekend to insult and harangue me, and celebrate my departure from a party which – according to those who have been in the party for less than five minutes – I should never have been part of in the first place.

They’re wrong about that: until September 2015, Labour was the only sensible political vehicle for those of us who sought to regulate and nurture a free market system and the public services that system funds. And in government, we did a pretty good job of delivering on Labour’s core values and aspirations. That is not enough for the new leadership and its many hundreds of thousands of supporters in its ranks. While most of us want improvement, they prefer revolution, something Labour has always opposed.