Converting the Corbyn cult

If Labour is ever to clamber out of its cage on the fringe of politics, it will have to convince the 250,000 supporters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn to turn from far-leftists into social democrats. The necessity of persuading them that they made a terrible mistake is so obvious to Labour MPs that they barely need to talk about it.

In case it is not obvious to you, let me spell it out. Corbyn exacerbates every fault that kept Labour from power in 2015, and then adds some new ones, just for fun. To the failure to convince the voters that Labour can be trusted with control of the borders and the management of public money and the economy, Corbyn and his comrades bring their support for the nationalist and imperialist Putin regime, the theocratic Iranian regime, and the women-, Jew- and gay- haters of radical Islam. Corbyn’s Labour will ask a Britain it seems to despise to give it power. Britain will never do so, and every Labour politician I have spoken to accepts that the Labour party will have to destroy Corbyn before Corbyn destroys the Labour party.

A palace coup is not impossible. The party conference has to endorse Labour’s leader annually. In normal times, the endorsement is a formality. These are not normal times, however, and if the parliamentary party puts forward just one candidate, and refuses to nominate Corbyn or a supporter of Corbyn, the members would have to accept the replacement.

Tony Blair’s former adviser John McTernan has been arguing for weeks that MPs should put the interests of Labour voters before Labour members and dump Corbyn in 2016. The left would go wild; Labour members would scream that MPs were backstabbing bastards who had overridden party democracy.