A party at war: it’s in with the new Old and out with the old New

In the street, a reporter asked Jeremy Corbyn if he was ready to be Labour leader. “We’re doing well,” replied Mr Corbyn calmly. “We’re very happy.” Goodness. Margaret Thatcher had been prime minister for 10 years before she started using the royal “we”.

It was a day when a new front opened up in the Labour Party’s war against itself. This latest conflict was between New Labour, in the form of Tony Blair, and Old Labour, in the form of Mr Corbyn – although, given that a poll makes Mr Corbyn favourite to win the leadership contest, Old Labour may soon be new Labour, making New Labour old Labour. Exciting, isn’t it?

In the morning, Mr Blair did a speech and Q&A at a Labour supporters’ event in London. He stopped short of screaming, “Oh my God, are you all out of your minds?” But not by much.

A “Left-wing platform”, he went on to say, would “take the country backwards”, in the “unlikely” event Mr Corbyn won a general election. Labour was “going back in time” to the early Eighties, when it “persuaded itself that the reason the country voted for Margaret Thatcher was because it wanted a really Left-wing Labour Party. This is what I call the theory that the electorate is stupid.”

Left-wingers like Mr Corbyn were “in fact quite reactionary”, and blind to the chasm between their own beliefs and the public’s. On the rare occasions they did notice the chasm, they always assumed it was the public that was on the wrong side of it, never themselves.

“When I became leader, we had a meeting where a guy got up and said: ‘Tony, the British people have now voted against us four times in a row. What on earth is wrong with them?’”

And as for Labour members who said their “heart” was with Mr Corbyn: “Get a transplant!” I’d call it a rant, if he hadn’t delivered it in such a consummately Blairish way: outwardly tranquil, smiling, with the occasional frown of paternal bemusement.

Mr Corbyn, sadly, was not in attendance. But reporters found him on his way to a policy seminar and kindly put Mr Blair’s thoughts to him. At first, Mr Corbyn said he wouldn’t “get involved in personal stuff ”. But they soon wore him down.

Mr Blair, they said, had called him the Tories’ preference. “He said I’m what?!” squeaked Mr Corbyn. “Well, I’d have thought he could manage something more serious than those rather silly remarks.”

Did he consider Mr Blair’s views irrelevant? “I think Tony Blair’s big problem is that we’re still waiting for the Chilcot report to come out,” he snapped.

Didn’t he think Labour should listen to its most successful leader? “We did win in 1997,” allowed Mr Corbyn grudgingly, “but we lost support consistently after that.” (Mr Blair won a mere two further general elections.)

Well, nice to see the Opposition in such good shape. Let the march to victory commence.

‘He stopped short of screaming, “Oh my God, are you all out of your minds?” But not by much’