BACK in the dark post-general election days of 2015 when Labour had just suffered its second defeat in five years, there was a group of people within our own party who could barely conceal their delight over our loss.

For them this represented a golden opportunity to take our party back to the unequivocal right. In those pre-Corbyn days, Ed Miliband, or “Red Ed” as the red tops liked to call him, was too left-wing for these people. His policy on the mansion tax and non-doms was the politics of envy and it had stopped us winning a resounding victory.

Of course many of us knew this was bollocks. What lost us the election was an uninspiring, incongruent manifesto that was neither fish nor fowl. Less red and more an ugly shade of fuscia. For every inspiring policy there was an Establishment-appeasing policy to cancel it out. Our voters just stayed at home.