Slippery slope for Bananaman and the 2 Nicks
OME at the event insisted moderates must find a new centre-Left champion who could have the potential to win a leadership contest once Mr Corbyn retires. Others argued that the party is now so deep in the grip of hardLeft activists that it is beyond saving.
Former Labour donors are ready to back a new party. Discussions are said to be ongoing with Tory Remainers being targeted as potential defectors. Senior figures including Tony Blair, George Osborne and Lord Ashdown, are understood to have been involved in the talks.
Yet such plotting ignores the question of whether there is an appetite among voters for yet another pro-Brussels grouping. Renew, a tiny anti-Brexit party launched earlier this year, fought several wards in London at the council elections earlier this month. In the poll every Renew candidate was defeated in the poll, including a sitting councillor who had defected from the Tories.
Even more problematic for the new party plotters in Labour, Tory and Lib Dem ranks is that the single issue that unites them is a desire to overturn the result of the 2016 EU referendum.
They have little hope of developing a new vision for the country’s future as long as they remain obsessed with reversing the tide of history.
CLINGING on to the dream that Brexit can be stopped is also distracting MPs fed up with their existing parties from making the break and building a new organisation from scratch. The drawn-out parliamentary progress of Brexit legislation means there is always one more crunch battle for the Remainers to fight.
A series of victories by a crossparty anti-Brexit alliance in the House of Lords shows the diehard Brussels supporters can be far more effective staying where they are rather than coming together into a single force that could struggle to build electoral appeal.
Mr Miliband refused to say anything about his future ambitions after delivering his lecture about the dangers looming in the Brexit negotiations. He jetted back to the US leaving those who see him as the potential leader of a new force still guessing about the future.
Lost centrists yearning for a new party have little hope of Bananaman or any other superhero swooping out of the skies any time soon.