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