Labour’s lost thinker

Shortly before the last election a group of Labour MPs approached Ed Miliband to ask him what he would do if he lost. They suggested he could provide stability by staying on as leader for a while, as Michael Howard had done, and that his last duty should be to oversee an inquiry into what went wrong at the general election. Miliband, still convinced he would win, did not entertain the idea, to the dismay of his policy chief, Jon Cruddas. After the election, Cruddas decided to go ahead and do an inquiry anyway.

The results will infuriate the Labour left. The inquiry found that Labour’s anti-austerity message put voters off. The inquiry divided Labour’s supporters into three groups: Jeremy Corbyn’s tribe of affluent, socially liberal, metropolitan ‘pioneers’; the less starry-eyed pragmatic ‘prospectors’; and socially conservative ‘settlers’ concerned with home, family and national security. As recently as last November, it found, Labour’s support covered all three. By the election only the diehard ‘pioneers’ still had warm feelings.

It’s a bleak picture. But when I meet Cruddas, he seems excited by what’s going on. ‘Something quite extraordinary has developed through the summer and a lot of it I find really quite positive,’ he says. Corbynmania even swept his own family: his mother, two of his brothers and sisters and his son joined Labour. ‘None of them joined when I stood for elected representation!’ he says.

Cruddas seems unfazed by the apparent crisis within the party. ‘Would it have been better to have a very quiet summer, and possibly a boring leadership election, with all these issues left to fester?’ he asks. ‘Perhaps what was needed was to actually tip the whole thing over.’

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‘This process will force people into thinking: hang on a second, where is this party going, what are we going to do about it?’ The last time that happened, he says, was 20 years ago, when Tony Blair became leader.