Corbyn fever has gripped the Labour leadership contest, amid warnings that they teeter on the verge of civil war. Suddenly the party that has been a reasonably friendly coalition through the Blair, Brown, Miliband years, begins to feel like the poisonous place it was in the early 80s. That’s when it split over toxic Militant entryism unchallenged by Michael Foot, its unelectable leader with a raft of impossibilist policies.



This is summer madness. I don’t believe that YouGov poll that puts Jeremy Corbyn in the lead: polling inside a small group is notoriously unreliable. Unless an army of trolls and Toby Youngs really has paid £3 to sabotage the party by voting for Corbyn, as shamefully advocated by the Telegraph, I don’t think a majority of Labour members will take leave of their senses.

Liz Kendall and Yvette Cooper would not serve in Jeremy Corbyn shadow cabinet Read more

Those Labour people who spent years slogging round the doorsteps, only to lose a raft of seats they expected to win aren’t about to choose a leader who will ensure it happens all over again. From Brighton Kemptown to Stockton South, Southampton Itchen, Thurrock and Rossendale and Darwen, gut-wrenching, heartbreaking defeat rewarded the efforts of all those foot-soldiers who gave up evenings and weekends in well-organised campaigns.

They heard what people said on the doorsteps and two things outweighed everything else: voters just couldn’t (and didn’t want to) see Ed Miliband as prime minister and voters still blamed Labour for the deficit, however unjustly. Other policies were highly popular – but voters’ impression of the leader was intimately bound up with perceptions of Labour’s economic credibility. I just don’t believe party activists who heard that for themselves will vote Corbyn in: if he wins, then genuine stalwarts will have been outvoted by incomers: a disaster.

What’s alarming for the next leader is the speed with which nastiness burst out. Rapid healing will be required. Straight after the election a note of viciousness seeped from the right of the party from their Progress base, behaving not unlike the Militants of old. They settled first on Chuka Umunna – he who begged me to support Ed Miliband at a Brixton hustings in 2010 – but has since mysteriously turned rightwards. Following his unexplained retreat, Liz Kendall took on that mantle in a campaign that has felt negative and dour, only at ease when castigating just about everything in Labour’s manifesto as an error. The former Blair adviser John McTernan’s famously vicious style gets him on the airwaves, calling people “morons” and the like – but “Blairite” they aren’t. The flash of the real Blair yesterday was a shadowy reminder of the deftness, flair and intelligence that made him a winner back in the day: his policies were often very good and sometimes very bad, but his political acuity was key. His intervention helped Kendall not at all, showing that she is no new Blair in her lacklustre presentations full of admonitions and without hope.

What’s alarming for the next leader is the speed with which nastiness burst out. Rapid healing will be required

As interim leader, Harriet Harman has frantically tried to keep the party’s wings together, but badly bungled the welfare bill. Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, well aware they would demand obedience in the Commons as leader, knuckled under unhappily – but both say they wouldn’t vote for the bill when it comes back. On the Today programme this morning, Cooper blasted away at the two-child benefit cap, pointing out that a mother of three, deserted by her husband, couldn’t now afford to take a job with those tax credits removed for her third child.

This long hiatus was bound to be a time of confusion. In the months and years ahead, the next leader must bring back the party’s further wings. Unity is the necessary if insufficient condition of electability. Under our tyrannical voting system, all parties are obliged to be coalitions before, not after, elections. There is no “purity” but compromise in any party broad enough to win an election. Holding onto principle while staying pragmatic is what makes politics the toughest art. Character, inventiveness, brain-power, staying-power and political imagination are essential. In my view, only Yvette Cooper has the potential to think her way through what’s to come, while holding onto social justice principles.

Just consider how much will change in the next five years, with a new Tory leader after a bitter EU referendum. The 2020 landscape is unknowable now. The cuts George Osborne has announced – 40% in most departments – are unthinkable, but he has ordered ministers to rethink the size of the state. Labour needs a tenacious and clever leader to confront the Tories at every turn and Labour members know that. Choosing an unelectable leader would betray all who desperately need a Labour government.