Sadiq Khan mayoral triumph is Labour's blueprint for surviving Corbyn

Sadiq Khan’s speech to the Labour conference was carefully crafted to win audience applause but also, and most of all, to make point after point about the need to win elections and wield power. He congratulated Jeremy Corbyn on winning the most recent election he has run in, the pushover that has further strengthened his stranglehold on the Labour Party. After that, Khan didn’t mention Corbyn at all. He didn’t need to. The London mayor had already made clear what he thinks of Corbyn’s chances of emulating on a national scale his recent triumph in the fight for City Hall: “If Jeremy remains as leader, Labour is extremely unlikely to win the next general election.”

Full marks for concision. So much is being written about Corbyn. So little is required. He is an ineffective Labour leader, both in parliament and in the country. Labour MPs from across the left-right spectrum have known this from day one. The Great British electorate too is unimpressed, including working-class voters Corbyn’s admirers insist he can inspire and floating voters he must attract.

Those who’ve kept him in place as party leader are either naïvely idealistic, coldly manipulative or blissfully consumed by their own piety. While Corbyn leads it, Labour will fail to command the House of Commons or the general public’s confidence. His notion of building Labour into a grassroots movement that will transform society from below is fanciful. That’s all you need to know.

The task now for Labour politicians who want to do more than address rallies of admirers and pretend in the face all evidence that they are on the path to victory is to work out how best to outlast Corbyn’s ascendancy until the Outer Left alliance that sustains him succumbs to disappointment, its customary internal bickering and its deep, ancestral longing to feel betrayed.

That struggle to endure will take various forms. Khan has shown a way to do it. Others have used the conference to get their own, related strategies underway. The mood music from those who haven’t joined the “I’m With Corbyn” chorus has been conciliatory in a minor key. How generously they’ve greeted a victory they think calamitous. How plangently they’ve harmonised with their conqueror’s calls for unity. It is all part of their survival strategy.

Andy Burnham, who has stayed on as shadow home secretary and steered a neutral course during the leadership campaign, was among the first to take this line. Next spring, he will seek to be elected executive mayor of Greater Manchester. His path to that post, which he clearly finds more appealing than being mired in endless parliamentary opposition, will be the smoother if he can neutralise the Corbyn drag effect.

Sparing himself harassment by Corbynite inquisitors will be part of that. A bigger part will be separating himself from Corbyn in electors’ minds. In London, Khan could hardly have distanced himself from Corbyn more completely, running a self-contained campaign and allowing himself to be seen just twice in Corbyn’s company.

His need to do so was increased by his having nominated Corbyn for the leadership ballot last year, despite being from the “soft” rather than “hard” left of the party. Cynics might suspect this was a ploy to help him vanquish his chief rival to become mayoral candidate, the Blairite Tessa Jowell. Cynics might be on to something there. Whatever, it led to Zac Goldsmith, Khan’s Tory opponent in the mayoral race itself, no doubt informed by private polling, trying to detrimentally link Khan and Corbyn in voters’ minds as part of a wider scare strategy.

Khan’s response was to insist and, indeed, to demonstrate that he was his own, very different kind of politician. Corbynites protest that Khan’s huge win in May was really Corbyn’s. Team Khan, which secured the win, don’t see things that way at all.

His success is now a blueprint for how Labour candidates of several kinds can establish in voters’ minds that they are not Corbyn’s men or Corbyn’s women. By this time next year there will almost certainly be Labour “metro mayors” in post in Liverpool and Birmingham as well as Manchester, with varying powers over their cities and surrounding areas. They, along with Carwyn Jones, the First Minister of Wales, will be the most powerful Labour politicians in the UK: high profile and, hopefully, on the road to becoming highly effective at implementing Labour programmes in new forms of regional government.

Their progress, and that of Labour leaders of other big cities - Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle and more - in the years leading up to 2020 will depend less on the endeavours of their party’s national leader than on their marshalling of the resources they have at their disposal and their ability to persuade, enthuse and cajole a range of interest groups – housing providers, public sector bodies, educators, voluntary organisations, businesses and so on - to pursue progressive common goals. In the longer term, they will want to talk to the Conservative national government into giving them greater leeway to do things their way in the post-Brexit national interest.

Collectively those governing Labour politicians could, in effect, represent a parallel, much broader Labour Party than the narrow one Corbyn leads; a very different political entity sharing the same name. This parallel Labour would be largely autonomous and, by necessity, pragmatic, practical and consensual. It would be localist, focused on fostering local growth, nurturing local skills and meeting local need, but also internationalist, looking outwards to the wider world to attract know-how and investment.

It could be electorally helpful to Labour council and parliamentary candidates too, its endeavours and mayoral figureheads boosting hard-pressed contenders for marginal wards and constituencies. Would such candidates sooner be photographed with can-do winners like a future Mayor Burnham or Mayor Khan, or with Corbyn, who looks to most voters like a loser? There is, of course, serious talk of a Labour split. But an informal Labour fragmentation looks more likely, with the party’s separate strands increasingly going their own ways within the UK’s increasingly fragmented political landscape. By such means Corbyn’s leadership might be survived.

Dave Hill is the author of Zac Versus Sadiq: The Fight to Become London Mayor, which is available from the Guardian Bookshop.