Labour’s leading lights have learned nothing from their election disaster

The Labour Party suffered a terrible defeat on December 12 and now has fewer MPs in the Commons than at any time in living memory.

This shouldn’t need saying given that the results of the general election were very much the opposite of a state secret, but the startling behaviour and utterances of most of Labour’s leading lights since shows that it clearly does.

Let me take you through a few highlights of Labour’s response to this thrashing: Jeremy Corbyn asserted that the party “won the argument” at the election; Rebecca Long-Bailey – the favoured Corbynista candidate to replace him – claimed in an article just the other day that Labour’s “transformative agenda is principled and popular”; deputy leadership candidate Angela Rayner objected to Iain Duncan Smith getting a knighthood on the (false) grounds that he had laughed in the Commons “as he passed welfare cuts to the most vulnerable”; Labour MP Nadia Whittome claimed