Sometimes in politics it is necessary to believe something before you know it is true. For the past decade, the radical left’s insistence that the liberal centre was facing imminent collapse was such a belief. It felt at times like a fantasy concocted by ideologues, student radicals and old-fashioned socialists, as indeed we were. For those of us active in the labour movement, the related argument that bold, radical ideas are more electable than endless pandering and triangulation is not just correct – it is a necessary belief for something like Corbynism to exist.
Maybe, some of us secretly thought, the centre would hold. Maybe the conservative technocrats would find a way out and centrist social democracy would reformulate itself. For a brief moment, it looked like François Hollande and Angela Merkel would paper over the cracks of the European project. Greece would be given a dignified way out of its nightmare. Remain would scrape home. Hillary Clinton would scrape home.
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