As someone who voted for Owen Smith, this week’s Labour party conference has been tough.
The coup or non coup or whatever you want to call it was a disaster and it never should have happened.
I’m not a big fan of Corbyn, but even I thought he should have been given more time to either succeed or fail on his own terms. The timing of Margaret Hodge and Ann Coffey’s motion of no confidence was too rash, and triggered a calamitous leadership challenge which has turned out to be a self-inflicted wound.
I get that MPs were angry and upset about the decision to leave the EU. I get that many of them loathed Corbyn and his team. I get that many of them felt at breaking point in terms of how they had been treated. I get that many of thought Corbyn was hopeless – I agreed with them.
But their anger clouded their judgment, and they raced headlong into this challenge without a strong candidate, a strategy, or a compelling vision to excite our members and the country.
In fairness to Smith, I don’t think there was a candidate who could have taken on Jeremy Corbyn at this time, and that is why we should have waited.
Not every new member is a terrifying Trot or a relic from militant days – many are decent people who felt we had lost our way and they wanted the party to rediscover its radical heart. And they were right. The truth is that while a Labour government did good, important work right up until its final days in power, we did become politically timid and could have listened more to our members and trade unionists. We became too managerial. We should have waited until we saw how Brexit was shaking down, and how Corbyn was performing when it came to the Labour response. We should have also seen how we fared in the local elections in May.
The moderates need to be honest about the scale of this defeat, accept it, and learn from it – no matter how painful and bruising that is. Corbyn won big again, and the prospect of unseating him in the foreseeable future has gone.
I’ve heard some talk about continued guerrilla warfare, of maybe trying to get a separate operation going in the chamber and begging the speaker to recognise someone other than Corbyn as the official leader of the opposition. That way lies madness and further humiliation.
It is also difficult for the parliamentary Labour party to make huge demands at this stage, no matter how sensible those may be – such as shadow cabinet elections – because the truth is, the PLP doesn’t have that much leverage. Corbyn can do what he likes. That’s the deal: to the victor, the spoils.
And then there is the thorny issue of whether to serve or not. I think it will be very difficult for any MP who has made a high-profile and highly personal resignation. If there are acres of coverage of you waxing lyrical about how dreadful Corbyn is, and how you have zero confidence in him, that will haunt your media appearances for a long time. It’s not exactly honest, straight-talking politics to say you have had a Damascene conversion, and it won’t pass the smell-test with the public.
If people choose to serve, then they need to do it properly, not just as a means of maintaining a bit of status or relevance. They have to put their shoulder to the wheel and do the job with energy and enthusiasm, and stick to the concept of collective responsibility.
If that’s too much for people, and they prefer to remain on the backbenches, there is much they can do to be supportive in a way that feels authentic. Be a great constituency MP. Help amplify the messages on which there are agreement, such as grammar schools. Use the time and space to do some of that deep thinking about policy and ideas that look to the future. Become an expert in something meaningful (select committees are going to be increasingly important). Craft a radical vision. Become relevant.
What you should not do is provide a bitter, angry running commentary about the failings of Corbyn. I suspect the wider public will start to have very little patience with MPs who continue to cause pointless trouble for the leadership on a daily basis, and will probably end up have some sympathy for Corbyn. Because the truth is, in the grand scheme of things, nobody really cares.
The commonsense view from the outside will be that this is a man who has defied political gravity – again. His opponents need to let him and his team have a proper run at things, as the master of his own destiny not the victim of an angry PLP. He needs to be able to own his victory. He has won that right. This amazing experiment will either be a triumph or take us to the brink of electoral oblivion. Only time will tell.