Take the strange, hitherto unknown man called Lloyd Russell-Moyle who gave a shouty barricade speech on election night when he was returned as a Labour MP, and who has since decided to woo over those who now have criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn by calling them “cunts“.

Then there is Corbyn himself, who declared that although he had just lead Labour to its worst defeat since 1935 he and his party had somehow nevertheless “won the argument”.

Corbyn’s loyal band of media outriders have been trying variations of the same trick. The weird authorities at Norovirus Media, without qualifications or experience, have been telling people about the wild popularity of Labour Party politics, but one senses that the air is finally starting to drain out of these once-useful media creations.

By the same author

Accept it Remainers, you've lost

By Douglas Murray

The other loyalists, Owen Jones and Paul Mason, have both performed as one would expect. Neither has any experience in getting a prime minister elected; neither has ever been in frontline politics; both are full-time campaigners for the far-Left anywhere who present themselves as “journalists” everywhere; both spent recent years telling the country to vote for Jeremy Corbyn to be PM.

So it has been a joy of a kind to watch both men spend the days since the General Election explaining what the Labour Party needs to do now to get back into power. Both men presumably think that the switcheroo they have been hiding behind for years (journalist, not a journalist) is going to keep working and that people will forget that having pounded the streets for Corbyn they are now merely disinterested psephologists who are available to provide help whenever asked.

Still, these are media outriders. The problem for the party as a whole lies deeper at its heart, where the virus that Corbyn and his supporters brought will continue to linger. Putative competitors for the leadership talk about the importance — post-Corbyn — of a Labour leader having a meeting with the Chief Rabbi. Perhaps they could bring a “sorry” card and deliver it by hand? Such ideas again suggest that at the top of the party there is little-to-no recognition that Labour has one almighty problem.

But the most interesting escapology is still to come, and here things turn from the vaguely comic to the fairly solemn. Because, of course, there should be an Opposition in Britain, and in this Parliament — if not afterwards — it will continue to be provided by the Labour Party. And here we catch sight of one almighty problem.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

All parties have bad years and there is not only a certain sense but even a nobility in sticking through them. Anybody can hold onto things when they are on the up, but it is in grimly keeping on when everything is down that character is shown. But the MPs who now sit on the Labour benches have suffered not just defeat at the ballot box but a very considerable exodus from their party.

Take Chuka Ummuna, who was for a time talked about as though he might be a future Blairite leader of the party. He quit Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour in February this year, partly because he said that it had become “institutionally racist”. That is a very serious charge indeed, especially to throw at a party whose members have perhaps been keener than most at levelling it against others.

Ordinarily the sins of failure surrounding a leader and a party are easier to brush off. When Conservatives needed to escape the legacy of William Hague or Iain Duncan-Smith they had to make lots of noise about wrong turns taken and the lack of leadership in the party. Labour knows the drill, too, and when Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband led them to electoral defeat nobody had to explain why they had been comfortable to hang around in an institutionally racist party.

But Corbyn is different. Corbyn toxified the whole thing.  So what are those who were content to stay around and be toxified now going to say?

When we see people such as Emily Thornberry and Keir Starmer announcing that they would like to be Jeremy Corbyn’s successor as leader of the party, there are a number of questions that might be asked of them, perhaps the first being “Do you think that Chuka Ummuna was right or wrong in saying that under Corbyn Labour had become ‘institutionally racist’?  If you do not agree then please say why, otherwise please explain why you chose to stay in a racist political party?”

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By Mary Harrington

Likewise with Jess Phillips. Among her generation of MPs there are very few who have started out sounding so independent and ended up doing exactly the opposite of what their words suggested. Phillips’s political schtick is that she exudes a sense of moral outrage and that “I’ll say whatever needs saying, however much harm it does me, if I know it to be true”. So at some point, as she sketches out her moral vision for Labour in the years to come, and explains how Labour can come back to government, Ms Phillips will have to be asked some questions.

They may include some variation on the following: “Your friend and now former fellow MP Luciana Berger was chased out of the Labour Party because of racist and sexist bullying. She said she would not put up with it and so she left. She ran as a Liberal Democrat and did not get back into Parliament. However, you, Jess Phillips are still in Parliament. Do you think your friend Luciana Berger was lying when she talked about the racism in your party? And if she was telling the truth then why did you not leave the Labour Party in solidarity with your racially abused friend?”

Now of course Phillips might have a number of attempted ripostes to that. She might say “I thought it was important to stay in the Labour party because I knew that one day the nightmare of the current leader would be over and we would need to rebuild the party from the inside.” And that might have worked fine if the nightmare leader had been a Miliband or a Hague. But it was not like that.

So this past week and a half has given us plenty of interesting things to watch. But I suspect that the era to come is going to include some digging so contorted that we are going to have to watch it between our fingers.

And for those who talk glibly of simply doing a cheap refurb job on the Labour party there is simply no recognition of the scale of the task now in front of them. Corbyn wasn’t just toxic himself. He made the entire party of the Left toxic. It remains so, contaminating all who stayed through his tenure. And like the decontamination of any toxic terrain this is not going to get cleaned up swiftly or without further casualties.

“It is a new dawn, is it not?” Boris in victory couldn’t help himself, regurgitating the 1997 remark with which Blair proclaimed his own era. Laughing at Blair’s messianic pretension, throwing it back in Labour’s shocked, defeated faces.

Boris has a talent, shared by no other politician, of being able simultaneously to poke fun at his overblown Churchillian rhetorical style, without undermining the seriousness of its message. It’s (one reason) why he drives his opponents to insanity – did you see that sliver of malice, Alastair Campbell, snarling about “Johnson” on Friday morning? He hates that we think of the PM as “Boris”. Snarl away, Campbell, for all the good it’ll do your shrivelled, impoverished politics. Snarl right off, in fact, and close the door behind you.

Because this was a victory, above everything, for decency; a rejection of every strain – not just the Corbynite variety – of the linguistic and psychological thuggery that Labour has dressed up as virtue and forced down your throat since 1997. The political map is redrawn, and the Tory Party entirely re-invented. The consequences of that reinvention deserve many articles – it is literally a new party. But first let’s pick over the brittle, dusty bones of a dead one.

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By David Goodhart

The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

The Blairite leftovers in Parliament have no sociological constituency to give them hope. Were some miracle to strike the planet and, for example, Yvette Cooper to become leader: do you think her approach to immigration, or those robotically-repeated platitudes about equality, sprung from the deathly pages of an identity-politics HR manual, could win back the good people of, say, Sedgefield?

Neither will intellectual renewal come from the fourth estate for ‘moderate’ Labour (the scare quotes around ‘moderate’ are apposite, because I’m unclear how MPs who willingly empowered a hard-Left, terrorist-succouring leadership, and wanted you to vote it into power, could label themselves thus). The columnist cheerleaders of ‘moderate’ Labour, social democracy, whatever – they’ll keep coughing up their pro-EU yawn pieces, laced with their Boris hatred, until economic reality catches up with their increasingly un-read newspapers, and The Guardian closes its doors.

Could the Left’s future come from the gut, rather than the brain? Perhaps a mission can be discerned within the screech-sheet manifesto of Jess Phillip’s Twitterfeed: Boris-is-a-racist, Boris-hates-women, Boris-eats-your-kids, I’m authentic, me, I care therefore you can’t.

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Is this the end for Labour?

By Paul Embery

Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

Do you think men and women like Keith don’t notice, Jess, when you claim that only socialists like you care about people? That his vote in the Brexit referendum was tarnished, because he doesn’t have a degree? Do you believe him so arithmetically incapable that he couldn’t predict what your policies would do to the savings accrued from decades of average-income work?

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And do you think he was deaf to the anti-Semites in your movement, blind to your party’s tolerance of them? He’s an unexamined Anglican, and the only Jewish people we know are the married couple next door; did you assume, therefore, he would swallow all that guff about Labour being the sole repository of moral virtue, that he couldn’t draw a line between your leader’s “friends” and the fear we could smell on our street?

Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

But they can, and do, have consequences. On Thursday, without telling me, Keith took time off work. For the first time in his life, he went to the Tory office on the High Street, picked up lists of names, and walked round the homes of our neighbours, in the rain, in the dark, encouraging Conservatives to come out and vote.

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The dramatic irony! Labour finally achieved its ambition to empower and politicise the working-class: Keith walked 15 miles on Thursday, but he’d have crawled over broken glass to keep people like Corbyn from winning seats like Barnet. Not quite what Hardie had in mind, but there you go. I love Keith, of course: I’m only just beginning to understand why.

There’s so much more to be written – how to deal with Sturgeon, the BBC, the re-centering of power out of London and into the North, how to renew our misdirected Academy … but that’s not for today, and probably not for me.

Today, I’m just a guy who’s feeling humble, but proud. Proud to live in a nation where working-class and middle-class, North and South, stood in solidarity against a common threat.

Humbled to be married to a man called Keith, who saw Corbynism for the wicked filth it is, and so did what he does every day of his life: he rolled up his sleeves and went to work. To keep Barnet, our home, safe. Keith (who will be mad at me if he sees this) would probably call it his “duty”; an inability to comprehend that word is just one more reason why Labour deserves its extinction.

This is, we are told throughout conference in Brighton, a new Labour: organised, united, filled with generous and effective policies — they have found dragon gold — repentant on anti-Semitism and ready to take the fight to the external, rather than the internal, enemy. None of this is true.

I read politics by detail, not spouted fantasies. At a small fringe meeting on the freighted subject of the abuse of women in public life – about 90% of attendees were female, of course, in this party of equality — delegates complained to Diane Abbott, one of the most abused women in public life, that they suffered misogynist abuse in their party.

How could they hope to change the world, one asked, if they could not change themselves? Abbott allowed that internal party misogyny was “wrong”, but said little else on it, before turning to external enemies, and their evils — as she does on radio, attacking Tories, refusing to see cruelty if it is close to her. Then she left, and the room sank with disappointment; nothing would be done about the “Brocialists”.

I have seen this before, when Luciana Berger told her testimony about the anti-Semitic abuse she has suffered in parliament. Diane Abbott could not look at her, as if the sisterly feelings do not extend as far as Berger; do not extend beyond political allies. I wonder if Abbott is inured to it, except when it happens to her. That would be excusable in any other woman but an aspiring Home Secretary.

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By Tanya Gold

A far better attended event was “The Media War on Labour and How to Defeat It”, which throbbed with conspiracism. The best way to defeat it, of course, is to stop providing opportunity for them — Tony Blair managed to seduce the media to three election victories — but that would require self-reflection. So, they provide opportunity like a man punching himself in the face.

There was the attempted coup against the deputy leader Tom Watson. It was aborted, but “Shun Tom Watson” leaflets were still circulated, and a rally planned during his speech. Both the speech and the rally were later cancelled. Everything was thwarted.

The resignation of Andrew Fisher, Corbyn’s close aide, citing “a lack of professionalism, competence and human decency” at the top of the party was another opportunity for the media to write lies — I mean truth — about Labour.  “I no longer have faith we can succeed,” he said.  They blame the media for reporting on splits. They do not look to the cause — that they do, actually, split.

The insanity of the vote on the “Back Remain Now” motion, in which the chair appeared to change her mind about Conference’s wishes after the General Secretary muttered her wishes in her ear was more opportunity. If it was machination, it was appallingly done. Enemies would say: you cannot even manage to be effectively corrupt.

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The Left is deceiving itself over antisemitism

By Douglas Murray

And again, and always now, anti-Semitism. Labour is raging on the accusations, which prod its essential benevolence, the belief on which it depends; but not on the reality, about which they are completely in denial. The reality is that delegates to Labour in Brighton all passed, as they walked into Conference, a cartoon of a warplane decorated with a Star of David bombing Jeremy Corbyn on his podium.

You cannot govern without attention to detail. You cannot be moral without attention to detail either, whatever you tell yourself. The police removed it, after complaints from the Jewish community, but Corbyn, who lies to himself above all on these matters, claimed it was he who had it removed. He said so on his Twitter feed.

All week, internal saboteurs — real, not imagined — fizzed around the edges, their psychological imperatives disguised, and not well, as political aims. They are conspiracists; they need to believe themselves oppressed by some great enemy because it explains all their failures in life. The Labour Representation Committee (LRC) established themselves in the Rialto theatre and spouted the usual conspiracy theories about Zionism and Blairites and Momentum. John McDonnell is still their president; that aside, he says he has nothing to do with them.

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Labour should be careful what it wishes for

By Paul Embery

Labour was my party and I struggle, as I nod at their policies, and approve of them, to understand why I trust them so little under Corbyn. I think it is their monomania, their paranoia, their loathing of internal critics – a lack of compassion for the different – and sometimes, I wonder how much they actually respect parliamentary democracy: if you are certain you are right, you do not need it.

It would enrage them to hear it, but they are as responsible for brutal political language as anyone; they have been calling Tories murderers for years. If you agree with them, they are kindest people in the world. If you don’t, they hate you, and hatred does not play well on the doorsteps in Hove.

You can argue whether a Socialist project in a country which is also a constitutional monarchy where the Queen has a 72% approval rating (Corbyn’s is 21%) and Downton Abbey, a film about servants longing to serve is No.1 at the box office, will ever be tenable, or is mere dreaming. Sometimes I find it very touching dreaming. At the reinstate Clause 4 rally in a church hall where they pondered a different anomaly – why can’t we share? – I actually wept bourgeois tears.

But this remains a party in denial about itself, and how others view it. Corbyn’s speech was followed by a mass singing of the hymn Jerusalem. Considering Labour’s relationship with the Anglo-Jewish community, it did not feel like a call to arms to the desperate beyond the Labour Party who need a functioning opposition. It felt, rather, like something maiming itself.