Right Out

If the Left could get Rebecca Long-Bailey onto the ballot for Leader of the Labour Party, then she would win.

The final decision rests with the members in the country at large, and they will elect the most left-wing candidate on offer.

The MPs might then kick off again, but this will be a five year Parliament, giving their Constituency Labour Parties ample time in which to deselect them.

And where would they then go? They hate Boris Johnson viscerally, and they are well to the right of his economic programme, the purpose of which is to hold the Conservatives' 2019 gains and to add some neighbouring seats that his party narrowly failed to win this time.

That party is also sufficiently awash with Russian money for Johnson to be no Saudi puppet of the Blairites' dreams. Paid by both sides, he cannot attack either of them. In the cause of peace, that is a strategy of sorts. Although one side does continue to attack Britain, in Britain.

As for his own fiscally and militarily hawkish MPs, they, too, have nowhere else to go, and they, too, have more than enough grounds to fear local parties that are fan clubs of the Leader.

That is now the guiding principle of both parties: you can be as beastly as you like to the Right, because it has nowhere else to go.