The missed chance to crush Corbyn has condemned Labour to oblivion

An inevitable and ruthless purging of moderates – with only themselves to blame – awaits after the leader’s re-election

No one can say that the catastrophe that has just engulfed the Labour Party with the reelection of Jeremy Corbyn on a thumping 61.8 per cent of the vote – including 59 per cent of full party members – was not entirely self-inflicted.

They have had their very own “second referendum” and have deliberately chosen to go down the path of electoral oblivion, despite all the polling data, the historical parallels and the warnings from the only people in recent Labour history who have actually won elections. The morning after the Conservatives are re-elected in 2025 – probably with a 60-year-old Boris Johnson as prime minister – Labour Party members will not be able to blame it on anyone else.

“We’ve got to demand systemic change,” the shadow chancellor John McDonnell was caught stating on a video recorded in 2013 which came to light 10 days ago. “Look, I’m straight, I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist. This is a classic crisis of the economy – a classic capitalist crisis. I’ve been waiting for this for a generation! For Christ’s sake don’t waste it, you know.”

Quite apart from the repulsive cynicism of the remark, the frank assertion that he was a Marxist (a pedant would argue Marxist-Leninist) ought to have sunk the campaign. It should have been the equivalent of Theresa May being caught on camera saying she wouldn’t accept Syrian refugees into Britain because “Look, I’m straight, I’m honest with people: I’m a racist.” Yet it barely caused a ripple in the narcissistic, conspiracy theory-addicted closed echo-chamber that is Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

There should have been parallels with the career of George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party from October 1932 to October 1935, who was beloved of the rank and file, reformed the party’s organisation – just wait for the Corbynista purge later this year – and believed in systemic change through a mixture of revolutionary and evolutionary methods, as he set out in his book My

England (1934). Like Corbyn he was a pacifist, who, in October 1933, even after Hitler had come to power, told his party conference: “I would close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disband the Air Force.” He was finally forced out by the Labour moderates, as the Tories sailed to a massive landslide election victory. As he lay dying in May 1940, just as Hitler unleashed his Blitzkrieg on the West, he asked for his ashes to be buried at sea as “I am a convinced internationalist”.

The moderates in the Labour Party of Bevin and Attlee were capable of ruthlessness against pacifists such as Lansbury as well as the Communists who constantly tried to infiltrate the party, but today’s moderates have lost that knack, as yesterday’s result shows. Labour’s general secretary Iain McNicol was accused by Corbynistas of trying to carry out a “rigged purge” – are there any other kind? – by excluding party members who joined after January 2016, but it clearly made little difference. Watch now for hard Leftists such as Jennie Formby of Unite now being set up against McNicol, or, just as likely, McNicol adopting a Corbynist tune to save his job.

Across the party there are moderates worrying about their futures, especially as the boundary changes will undoubtedly be used by Momentum to effect widespread deselection of moderate MPs. All political parties have collective, almost folk, memories, and the strongest one in Labour is of the SDP split of 1981-82, in which some of the brightest and best Labour ministers left the party over its policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament (expect that to come up again at the Labour party conference in Liverpool, by the way) as well as the leadership of Corbyn’s predecessor Michael Foot.

Yet it is vital not to mix up cause and effect, as the Corbynistas like to do in their myth-making over the SDP split. It was the prior unelectability of Foot’s Labour Party that was the ultimate spur to the actions of Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and the other moderates in leaving Labour. It was not the split that made Labour unelectable, putting Margaret Thatcher in power for years; Labour had accomplished that by itself already, just as it has done all over again yesterday.

Those memories – or in this case, this false-memory syndrome – torments the Labour moderates today. They fear that splitting Labour will merely hand over power to MayJohnson for the foreseeable future, so instead of leaving en masse they will be salami-sliced away by the superior political ruthlessness of Corbyn, McDonnell, and Labour’s terrifying communications director Seamus Milne (who is a dead ringer for the heartless Bolshevik commissar Strelnikov played by Tom Courtenay in Doctor Zhivago). If you want to see what will happen to the plotters after this failed coup attempt, think President Erdogan in Turkey.

There is even some evidence that key moderates don’t understand how dire the situation truly is. Writing in the Guardian yesterday, McNicol emphasised how Labour in 2015 had seen a “triumph in London, in Bristol, and we still have a Labour first minister in Wales. We have a huge influx of new members, we are half a million-strong and the biggest party in Europe. Theresa May has never won an election as prime minister. Our job is to make sure she never does.”

Choosing this week of all weeks to challenge Mrs May to try to obtain a personal mandate as prime minister in a general election shows how divorced from reality some Labour moderates are. If Mrs May asked the British people today who they would trust to deliver a competent Brexit – her or Jeremy Corbyn – it would lead to Labour’s electoral annihilation.

Labour’s hatred of Blairites – who after all did deliver the party three successive election victories for the only time in its history – was on full view in the campaign, with McDonnell describing Alastair Campbell’s views as “nauseating” on

Question Time. Whereas Tories tend to venerate the leaders who win them elections, Labour puts ideological purity before electoral success. The more Left-wing the Labour leader – as demonstrated by Lansbury, Foot, and Corbyn in due course – the worse they do; by total contrast the more Right-wing the Tory leader – Lord Salisbury and Margaret Thatcher being the best examples – the more likely the Tory landslide.

The reason that the Tory party has not split since 1845 is not simply because they are more focused on being in power than on winning ideological battles, it is because they have tended to choose the right leaders at the right time and have also viciously disposed of the wrong ones. There has always been a potential assassin in the wings, hiding his knife in his (or her) toga and ready to look credible in power.

Today, none of the Labour moderates fulfils that role. David Miliband is abroad; Dan Jarvis and Sir Keir Starmer are unknown and untried; Tristram Hunt is too goodnatured; Chuka Umunna flinched from the struggle; Tom Watson is in denial; Yvette Cooper is uncharismatic; Ed Balls is out of parliament and busy dancing.

It is impossible to imagine any of them saying, as Winston Churchill told a dinner in New York in 1949: “I tell you, it’s no use arguing with a Communist. It’s no good trying to convert a Communist, or persuade him. You can only do it by having superior force on your side [and using it] in the most ruthless manner.”

Until a credible Labour moderate can say that about Jeremy Corbyn – who was lauding Karl Marx on The

Andrew Marr Show as recently as July 2015 – the party deserves all it’s about to get.