Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party. Lewis Goodall

and pro-market liberalisation of the British economy had shaken up the jigsaw of British political economy, just as Cameron would do (albeit much less successfully) with his regearing of politics towards the austerity agenda. The Labour Party in both cases was in desperate need of a political and moral response to these profound events. In both cases, Blair and Corbyn provided that trenchant, startling rearticulation of Labour values and clear political philosophy to guide their parties through these treacherous and uncertain times. In both cases, they were preceded by leaders of their ilk who started reforms in the direction they eventually took but who were widely perceived as vacillating and neither quite one thing nor the other, by their party and the wider electorate alike. They were just at different ends of the scale. In 1994 and 2015 both sensed their opportunities and they took them.

      They were both, also, lucky with their enemies.

      On the day before the leadership result was announced I attended Kendall’s final press conference of the campaign. It was held at Methodist Hall, just across the road from Parliament. It was an appropriate venue. As Corbyn finished off his 99-stop nationwide tour across the country, surrounded by thousands of joyous, gleeful, optimistic activists and supporters, Kendall’s journey ended deep in the bowels of a Westminster venue, surrounded only by journalists who’d come for sport and a cast of Blairite ghosts who’d come for solidarity. Some of the characters there had been with Blair a decade before, and a dozen or so other MPs, special advisers and think-tankers had assumed only a few months or so before that their time had come again. They looked grief-stricken – and none more than Kendall herself. She couldn’t then know that the result would be as bad as it was, but she knew she’d lost and would almost certainly come fourth. I watched her take to the stage, resolutely, defiantly, ploughing through her speech, the last act of a career that had barely begun.