What the commentators said
We’ve all made mistakes in politics, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph, but Labour’s so-called moderates have made “a lifetime of them”. Their first was nominating Corbyn for leader, on the assumption that he couldn’t win – “one of the biggest misjudgements since Stalin was accepted as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922 because he posed no threat to his colleagues”. They then launched a premature challenge. “The rule of thumb is that it takes a good two years for a party to despair even of a very unsuccessful leader.”
You wouldn’t call Corbyn unsuccessful if you witnessed the buzzing atmosphere at Labour’s conference, said Paul Mason in The Guardian. While far-left activists were present, the crowds were made up mostly of ordinary people excited about a leader who is, at last, pursuing social justice. This is a genuine mass movement. “You cannot stop history. At some point, having been hijacked by the elite class, Labour was always either going to collapse – as it has done in Scotland – or revive.” Corbyn can certainly generate enthusiasm, said Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer, which is more than can be said for Labour moderates. The leadership campaign exposed their paucity of ideas: Owen Smith ran simply as a pale copy of Corbyn. If they want to win their party back, Labour moderates will have to come up with a compelling agenda of their own.
Moderates have little chance of reclaiming Labour, said Janan Ganesh in the FT. The idea that they can “outnumber the Left by recruiting hundreds of thousands of pragmatic voters to the party” is fanciful. “An invitation into an old, tainted party to fight ideologues who know the difference between Leninism and anarchosyndicalism for mastery of things called the National Executive Committee is, for many people, a refusable offer.” MPS would be better off starting afresh than pursuing a doomed, sentimental mission to “save” Labour. In the end, a party is just a “machine”. “If it is broken, fix it. If it cannot be fixed, build a new one.”