Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Can Labour’s moderates learn from all their mistakes?

Labour’s defeat is so terrible that it provides the kind of creative destruction that could save the party. It will be extremely difficult for the Corbynites to argue with much authority that one more push or slightly nicer newspapers would have got them over the line when the party hasn’t had a result this bad since 1935. But does the failure of Jeremy Corbyn necessarily mean that the ‘moderates’ in the party are going to be able to rescue it?

In 2015, centre-left Labour MPs were confident that the members were so bruised by what they’d heard on the doorstep that they would happily elect a leader who took the party back to the middle ground of politics. For about a week, this view reigned supreme and allowed the Liz Kendall leadership campaign to gain quite so much traction in Westminster. But it turned out that members had not heard the same thing as those MPs had: they wanted the party to pursue a purer politics instead and so Jeremy Corbyn won and Kendall only got 4.5 per cent. The moderates have not had any success in changing the narrative in the party since then, with a failed leadership coup in 2016, a botched split at the start of this year, and angry tweeted threats about red lines which were never followed through. The omens do not look particularly favourable for these MPs getting their act together now.

But as one senior moderate explained to me, the ball isn’t in their court anyway. It’s down to the National Executive Committee how the succession works. There could be a reasonably short timetable for replacing Corbyn, or a drawn-out review of why the party lost. There is (as you might expect) a split among moderates about which would favour them.

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