The Labour party must dig deep into roots if it is to survive. The Blairites cannot do it, they are finished now. The far left is triumphant but they are a tiny force in the Parliamentary Labour Party, and nowhere near as popular in the country as their deluded supporters imagine.
In the middle sit the broad mass of social democratic Labour MPs, and they do not know what to do. The leadership campaign showed that they could not inspire, although I thought that Yvette Cooper found her voice in its final weeks. They don’t know whether to sit in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet or to stand by their principles and retire to the backbenches.
Corbyn humiliates those who try to be loyal. They thought that they were serving a pro-EU leader, then Corbyn implies that maybe they are not. They want to say that the Tories’ attack on them as a danger to national security is outrageous, then their deputy leader Tom Watson has to admit that he doesn’t know if it is still Labour policy to remain in Nato.
The Tories strategy is clear: they don’t just want to beat Labour, they want to destroy it.
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