The party’s leader can’t afford to wait for a policy review before he starts articulating a compelling vision to the country
Another electoral test, another dismal postmortem for Labour. The least persuasive diagnosis of why the party has suffered some bitter disappointments is that offered by visitors from cloud-Corbyn-land who demand a return to the glorious days of the last leader. Labour has a lot of hard thinking to do, but the party’s mind will be wandering in precisely the wrong direction if it decides that the answer is to re-embrace Corbynism. For those with short memories, that was the suicidal experiment that crushed the party’s parliamentary representation down to its lowest level since 1935 and inflicted deep tissue damage to its reputation that is still hurting today.
There are more useful conclusions that can be drawn. One is that simply hoping that Tory failures will swing the pendulum back to Labour is not a reliable strategy for success. This is essentially the bet Sir Keir Starmer made last year by concentrating his efforts on lambasting the government for incompetence. There was plenty of it to go at. Less than six months ago, when the government’s handling of the pandemic was especially dreadful, every Conservative I spoke to was dreading what they were calling “a Covid election” in the belief that they’d take a beating for their serial bungling.
