Surviving the purge

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[/audioplayer]How long does it take to rebuild a political machine? Twelve months? Two years? Three years? Maybe it can’t be done at all.

Jeremy Corbyn has won. Everyone within Labour’s ranks acknowledges that now. The issue concentrating minds is how long it will take to remove him, how bloody the process of removing him will be and how much effort it will take to repair the damage once he has been removed — assuming the damage is reparable.

This is why Labour MPs are thinking about the machine. Perhaps one or two innocent souls within the Parliamentary Labour Party think it will be over by Christmas — that the wider party (including, presumably, its new members) will come to its senses and Labour MPs will swiftly isolate their new leader before moving in for the kill. A new leader will be anointed, and the dog days of the Corbyn summer will seem like a bad dream.

But most Labour MPs appreciate the scale of the task in front of them, and the nature of the opposition. ‘There are some people like Tristram and Chukka sitting there thinking, “This is great, we can just wait for him to fall flat on his face, then they can swoop in and pick up the pieces,” ’ one MP tells me. ‘But it’s not going to be like that. He’s going to control the party, the resources of the leader’s office, the constituencies, the selections, the lot.’

For all the brave talk of resistance and immediate fightbacks, Labour’s modernisers and pragmatists are simply not going to be ready to mount a serious challenge to Corbyn for many months, if not years, after his election.