So some people actually voted for Abbott?

The difficult question for me is who were the 0.88 per cent of Labour MPs, and 2.5 per cent of Labour members, who thought that Diane Abbott was the best possible person to lead the Labour Party? Admittedly this is the sort of proportion of voters who at elections decide to select the candidate from the Ku Klux Klan, or the Ban Chives Now! candidate or the dribbling bearded loon in a Union Jack costume and with the body of a stuffed ferret protruding from each ear, so designed to make you think it was actually implanted in his skull and who calls himself something from a Monty Python programme like Kevin Zzzzzzzupppp and thinks he’s absolutely fucking hilarious and sort of subversive, satirising the political process because they’re all the same, aren’t they, the parties, so let’s all have a bloody good laff, ha ha ha, etc.

Actually, thinking about it, these people usually get more than 2.5 per cent of the vote at general elections – but then the membership of the Labour Party, which includes me, is supposed to be a more sophisticated electorate and 2.5 per cent is therefore an astonishingly high figure.

Are you Tories happy with Red Ed, meanwhile? For me, someone who wished that the Labour Party might choose someone who was not part of the London middle class faux left who has never done an honest day’s work in his life, it is less than ideal. Because Ed is, even if he represents Doncaster. But then it could have been worse.

The first task, to my mind, is to re-connect with the millions of voters outside of the capital (and largely north of Bushey) who have drifted away from the party since 2001. Investment in technology and industry and infrastructure, redistributive economically but with a clear notion that there are deserving poor and undeserving poor……..