Watching Nick Clegg, Nicky Morgan and David Miliband sort of launching what might one day become a sort of new centre party amid a granary-full of Tilda rice in Essex, I realised why we still need the Labour party. Despite their equation of themselves with rationality — Sir Nick’s office advertises itself online under the name of Open Reason — the moderates are a bit crazy. They are centrist Bourbons, who have forgotten nothing about how they all, in their different ways, fell from power, yet have learnt nothing about why. How could they possibly think that the key to the future of our country is to be found in membership of the European Economic Area? I think I can see the chain of reasoning that got them there, but the conclusion is irrational nevertheless.
What makes them think that millions could ever rally to this banner? The last time something like this happened, with the invention of the SDP in the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher privately scorned the idea that it could succeed. Labour would not go away, she thought, because Labour ‘is the party of the underdog’, which she saw as a worthy and eternally necessary role. Obviously Jeremy Corbyn is currently perverting that cause, but that does not mean that Labour cannot survive him.
Morgan Clegg Miliband (it sounds like an investment bank) is a vehicle for the overdog — the class of people who run NGOs and the CBI and the European Commission and have diversity audits and access monitors and are, by self-definition, virtuous. They are often perfectly nice, but they are a ruling class more impermeable than the old aristocracy, and they still do not realise that voters no longer want them. Labour and the Conservatives, despite current appearances to the contrary, have deeper roots in human nature, and therefore greater supplies of common sense.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Spectator Notes, which appears in this week’s magazine, out now
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