Talk of a centre party is just hot air among today’s timid politicians

We don’t need a new force in Westminster, but Brexit is poorly served by a lack of consensus among MPS

The Roman Senate prised Cincinnatus from his plough to suppress the plebeian revolt threatening to bring it down. France summoned Charles de Gaulle from self-imposed exile in Colombey-les-deux-eglises to found the Fifth Republic. And Britain’s saviour in its hour of need? David Miliband, the man with the banana.

Ever since he departed these shores in a huff after losing the Labour leadership election to his kid brother, Mr Miliband has been seen by Labour moderates as the king over the water, the true heir to Tony Blair who would return to slay the Corbynite dragon and lead a new centre party.

But there was something distinctly dispiriting about his appearance at an Essex rice factory in the dark heart of Brexitland on Monday, alongside

Sir Nick Clegg, erstwhile Lib

Dem leader, and Nicky Morgan, Conservative chairman of the Treasury select committee.

The point about political returns is that they have to carry some risk for the returnee to mean anything. Merely mouthing some platitudes surrounded by bags of basmati does not really cut it. As one of the mystified journalists summoned to watch the Three Amigos perform asked: “What is the point of this event?”

The last time a former Cabinet minister returned from an overseas posting to lead a centre party campaign in the UK, Roy Jenkins founded the SDP. He had been president of the European Commission and came home to fight two by-elections, first at Warrington and then in Glasgow, to get back into Parliament from where he could lead the new grouping. He and the MPS who crossed the floor to join him in the House of Commons risked their careers on what proved to be a doomed effort to “break the mould” of British politics. But at least they tried.

Is Mr Miliband planning a dramatic re-entry into the British political maelstrom as the champion of the pro-european cause? He takes great issue with Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, just as Jenkins did with another Left-wing leader, Michael Foot, all those years ago. If he really believes what he says, Mr Miliband should fight the first by-election that comes along – or his supporters can engineer one for him – and get back into the only place from which political power should be wielded: Parliament.

Moderate Labour MPS and unreconciled Remainers are desperate for a leader. They lament Brexit, they despair at the direction the country is taking. They distrust their own leader and share few, if any, of his political convictions. And yet no-one has made a move towards creating the muchvaunted centre party, a creature about as likely to heave into view as the mythical chimera.

A few weeks ago it was reported that a new centre party was in the process of being created to “break the mould” of British politics, the very phrase used by Jenkins and his fellow Gang of Four members when they set up the SDP in 1981. At one point the SDP had the support of 50 per cent of voters, until the Falklands War and economic recovery punctured their appeal.

The latest iteration is apparently supported to the tune of £50 million by a network of entrepreneurs, philanthropists and donors, though nothing seems to have happened since its birth was announced in the Observer last month. New parties are rare beasts in Britain. Only the Labour Party in the past 120 years has developed into a vehicle for power. Hopeful centrists here in Britain look to Emmanuel Macron in France for inspiration in creating something from nothing.

But both Mr Macron and the SDP founders were prepared to leave their previous parties behind and jump into the unknown. Unless today’s disenchanted politicians are prepared to do the same, all the talk about a new centre party will be so much hot air.

This is not to say that cross-party consensus is unachievable or should not be sought. A common theme among the many tributes to Dame Tessa Jowell following her death on Saturday was her ability to bridge the political divide in search of agreement. It is testament to the disputatious nature of British politics that this should be such an uncommon characteristic among our politicians.

Prime ministers always come to office preaching national harmony, yet hardly ever achieve it. Theresa May promised “a country that works for everyone” yet has presided over division and disunity, and that’s just in her own Cabinet. Faced with the epochal challenge of Brexit, a different leader might have tried to recruit politicians from other parties to the cause of delivering it rather than dig in for party political trench warfare, which simply maximises the damage and gets nowhere.

I was struck by what Dan Hannan, the Tory MEP, had to say last week as he lamented the way Brexit is turning out. He had assumed that, by now, almost two years after the referendum, we would “have reached a broad national consensus around a moderate form of withdrawal that recognised the narrowness of the result”.

This was not a Remoaner speaking but a Brexit supporter who has long railed against the EU and its undemocratic predilections. He spoke for many Leave supporters like me, who do not share the interpretation that Mrs May, herself a Remainer, has placed upon the referendum outcome from the outset of her premiership.

So we don’t need a new party occupying the stodgy, idea-free centre trying to be all things to all people. It has been tried before and failed, though New Labour was arguably the closest we have come to an SDP Mk 2.

The Tory-lib Dem coalition demonstrated that cross-party consensus can work in government, but that only came about because the Conservatives failed to win the 2010 general election not because of any ideological desire for political harmony.

However, Brexit is such a big deal that we do need a leader who can take most of the country along. As Mrs May has discovered, the task is too great for a single party to carry out alone, especially one with no Commons majority. Moreover, this was not supposed to be just a Conservative process, but a national one. It could yet be turned into one; but the hour is getting late.