Labour MP John Spellar… appeared on the BBC’s Daily Politics programme and launched into a breathtaking rant about the party membership and voters – who are now all to the left of him.

Dismissing the membership as “Trots” – Spellar revealed the utter contempt with which the Blairite wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party holds their 380,000 members and millions of voters.

The embarrassing episode began with Conservative columnist and thinker Peter Hitchens telling the Labour MP for Warley in the West Midlands:

“You belong to a party which became Blairite, and Blairism has gone now. The Blairite party in the country now is the Tory party. You and the rest of the people in the Labour party who’ve been left behind by that…and are still Blairites have a choice to either sit there and moan, or go and join the true Blairite party – which is the Tory party – where you clearly belong.”

Spellar fired back that Hitchens “sounds like a member of Momentum” (a grassroots Labour movement).

Guardian columnist Zoe Williams challenged Spellar for “using ‘member of Momentum’ like an insult’”, reminding Spellar that these are people who have joined his own party. Spellar retorted:

“Yeah from the Greens, from the Socialist Workers, and the Alliance of Worker’s Liberty and all the other Trots”

Williams cut Spellar off at this point and delivered some home truths that it might be worth repeating to the Blairite community as a whole: