The battle lines are now drawn and the fight for the soul of the Labour Party has begun in earnest. In some ways this is a blessed relief. David Miliband’s pre-holiday intervention in the Guardian lanced a disfiguring conspiratorial boil that had been festering for far too long. The candidate of the “anyone but Miliband” campaign has yet to emerge, but already there is talk of a union-backed “bloke ticket” of the former deputy leadership candidates Jon Cruddas and Alan Johnson.
For ten years Labour had been a fragile but effective coalition. Now it is once more a set of factions, united only by the belief that Gordon Brown’s leadership is heading for the buffers. Only a shift to the Blairite right or the social-democratic left, or a profound reshaping of the government’s message in the centre, will rescue the party from oblivion. Gordon Brown’s failure to communicate Labour’s message is now identified as a potentially terminal problem from the cabinet down. Some ministers generously suggest that the government bears a collective responsibility for failing to get the message across, while others are more direct in their criticism of the Prime Minister. But the real question is whether insurrection will provide the remedy.
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