LABOUR MPS NOT BRAVE ENOUGH TO OUST CORBYN

LABOUR MPs are getting gloomier with every week that passes. After days of digesting the party’s grim local election results, morale has plummeted to new depths.

“We’re going to be out of office for at least another 20 years,” one despondent party insider told me this week. On that timescale it is effectively game over for a whole generation of politicians on the centre-Left.

Talk of a coup to oust hard-line leader Jeremy Corbyn evaporated this week, with more chatter about alternative career plans. Many party moderates have drawn the conclusion that the poll results were the worst they could possibly be: giving no hope of advance towards general election victory yet not quite dismal enough to justify dumping the leader.

Some on the Right of the party are suggesting that rumours of plots circulating before the town hall polls were disseminated by Mr Corbyn’s allies.

“They did a good job of rallying the Lefty grass-roots activists around him and bolstering his position,” said another source.

“It is the moderates who are getting the blame among the rank and file for rocking the boat.” For Mr Corbyn’s enemies it is back to the long strategy of simply waiting for something to turn up.

They remain shy of taking on the Left-wingers who swelled the party membership after last year’s general election. Moderates hope that the leader will eventually realise the party is going nowhere under his stewardship, do the decent thing and stand aside of his own accord.

Once again Labour has proved itself utterly gutless when it comes to the fine art of political assassination. As if to remind the party of that flaw, David Miliband made a brief return to the political spotlight. The former foreign secretary shared a platform with David Cameron at the British Museum to back the campaign to remain in the EU.

Mr Miliband briefly emerged as a potential replacement for the disastrous Gordon Brown, only to shy away from confrontation.

Labour MPs appear to be experts at plotting and feuding but duffers at finishing off the job.

Their faintness of heart is threatening their party’s very existence.