The Wilting Rose

This is the story of the Labour Party through five General Elections:

2017, 40 per cent of the vote, the only net gain in seats in the twenty-first century, and would have been the largest party if not for internal sabotage;

2019, called only because Keir Starmer's Brexit policy had given Boris Johnson his chance, or else a 2022 Election would have resulted in another hung Parliament;

2023, fewer Labour MPs than all other Opposition parties put together;

2027, fewer than 100 Labour MPs this time and forever thereafter; and

2031, so few Labour MPs that the Official Opposition becomes an alliance of all other non-Conservative parties apart from the DUP, including "Hard Left" parties and one that had grown out of Black Lives Matter.

Through all of this, the permanent Conservative Government implements much of the Labour manifestos of 2017 and 2019, secure in the knowledge that just as everyone would always laugh off the largely implemented 1983 manifesto as "suicidal" so long as there was never unilateral nuclear disarmament, so everyone would always laugh off the Corbyn years so long as there was never a second referendum on EU membership.