WHY THE BIGGEST LOSERS ARE THE BLAIRITES

Love him or hate him, there’s no question that yesterday’s election victory is a considerable achievement for Jeremy Corbyn. The 68-year- old Labour leader was written off by every self-appointed political expert when the campaign started.

They expected his campaign to collapse, all the more so because Corbyn was undermined by many from his own side, with a clear majority of Labour MPs refusing even to serve in his leadership team.

Yet he confounded the experts by securing more than 40 per cent of the popular vote – more than any Labour leader since Tony Blair in 2001.

When Mr Corbyn became leader, Labour had lost seats in four consecutive elections since 1997.

In the face of apparently insuperable odds, he reversed that trend, raising the number of party seats from 232 to 262.

Many predicted the death of the Labour Party itself when Mr Corbyn took over. Yet he has managed to bring it back to life. So how did he achieve this? Partly, it was Mr Corbyn’s refusal to be bullied into submission by his enemies within the Labour Party or by a hostile media. He also relished the cut and thrust of political debate.

He knows what he thinks and believes. And however unpalatable many find them, he was seen as standing by those beliefs – something which is almost unknown in the modern age of spin and lies. But Mr Corbyn had one huge additional advantage.

Since few took his campaign seriously, almost nobody drew attention to his dangerously impractical economic policies. very few seriously asked how Corbyn – who, as we know, is in thrall to the unions – could afford to nationalise the railways and the Royal Mail, while ending tuition fees, putting caps on energy bills and maintaining the triple lock on pensions and building one million new homes.

The answer – as this paper pointed out many times - is that he couldn’t without bankrupting Britain. But his supporters – many of them idealistic young people voting for the first time – couldn’t care less about such brutal financial realities and certainly can’t remember such horrors as the Winter of Discontent when, because of strikes, Britain couldn’t bury its dead. They were making a protest vote against what they saw – not without reason – as an utterly discredited political establishment.

This is why the biggest loser of the election was not Theresa May, who will carry on in office as Prime Minister, but Tony Blair and his coterie of modernising supporters.

The election result has certainly damaged the Conservatives – but Mr Blair and his supporters have been blasted out of our political life. And, for Corbyn, the revenge will be sweet.

MR Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson disloyally boasted that ‘I work every single day in some small way to bring forward the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure in office’.

Meanwhile Tony Blair treacherously encouraged voters to consider voting Tory or Lib Dem rather than Labour because of Brexit.

As far as I can discover neither Blair nor Mandelson lifted a finger to help the Labour campaign – disgraceful conduct in view of the way thousands of party workers selflessly helped them when they were in office.

Day after day, watchers never saw any Labour posters in the windows of Blair’s £5million house in Connaught Square.

I am told that Mandelson’s even more lavish residence in Regent’s Park contained no campaign posters either.

Indeed open Britain, a campaigning organisation chaired by Lord Mandelson, actually dedicated itself to the removal of Labour candidates (such as Kate Hoey) who supported Brexit.

Treacherous to the end, Blair, Mandelson and their supporters sought to engineer a collapse of the Labour vote so they could install themselves back in what they called the ‘centre ground’ of British politics.

every extra vote for Jeremy Corbyn was a disaster for Blair and Mandelson. Their modernising project is now dead.

Corbyn, who secured a higher percentage of the vote than Blair himself, can now reshape Labour as he and his union paymasters wish.

This creates a deeply embarrassing problem for the scores of Blairite MPs on the Labour benches, who have spent the last 18 months plotting to bring Corbyn down and replace him with an acceptable Blairite successor.

Should they continue to plot? or swing in behind their leader and ask for a front bench job?

It’s likely that they will return hypocritically to the Corbyn camp. They have nowhere else to go.

As for any talk that David Miliband, Tony Blair’s protégé and chosen successor, will return from the United States to lead Labour back to power – forget it. Mr Corbyn now has unlimited authority. He has a genuine claim to have done what Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson ultimately failed to do and re-invent the British Left.

Several months ago, wrongly believing Jeremy Corbyn to be finished, Tony Blair announced his intention to return to British politics. That plan is terminated. expect Messrs Blair and Mandelson to return to making money lobbying for overseas dictators.

THe fact is that Jeremy Corbyn’s new brand of politics has put Labour modernisers out of business for good. They may also have destroyed Labour’s chances of getting back into power.

For be in no doubt that the Labour leader’s political programme signals a return to the hard-Left, union- dominated politics that brought Britain to its knees in the 1970s - and which, I suspect, will never be accepted by the British voters.

Again, love him or loathe him, Mr Corbyn also recalls a politics before the age of spin when politicians had genuine beliefs.

Which means millions of voters have turned their backs not just on Tony Blair’s but also David Cameron’s style of slick, cynical and dishonest politics.

Hard times lie ahead during this moment of national crisis, but the death of such politics can only be a good thing for Britain.