Let’s hope Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer are lying when they defend calamity Corbyn

It should be obvious by now that Britain needs a strong opposition party. This assertion is not related to the fever dream of last year – as I’ve asked before, was Dominic Grieve real? Who was Philip Hammond? What was “super Saturday? – and the assorted failed shenanigans aimed at stopping Brexit.

Something much more important than that doomed opposition to the 2016 referendum result is at stake.

Why?

Although this is potentially an exciting time – with the first phase of the Brexit crisis over and the government trying to ” rebalance” Britain – the Tories have a lot of power and need checking and testing, by the media, by the voters, and by the opposition.

This is an iterative process that tends to make for better government. What applies in business – monopolies induce complacency, arrogance and the taking of the piss – applies in politics and statecraft too.

Tory dominance makes it more important than ever that Britain should have a credible, mainstream opposition party, ready to hold the Tories to account and to be there ready to form a non-Marxist government if they mess up and the voters decide that they would rather not give the Conservative party a fifth term in 2024. By then they will have been in power for 14 years.

Knowing this, it is thoroughly depressing to see candidates for the Labour leadership defend the catastrophic leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Keir Starmer, the front-runner to replace Corbyn, has been at it for weeks, saying that the three-time election winning New Labour government is to be treated as equivalent to the Corbyn era. Avoid trashing either, he says, in a transparent attempt to please the membership that is thought to be Corbynite. Obviously, Starmer has calculated that he needs to do this to win.

It would amusing if the membership turned out in this contest not to be quite as Corbynite as expected, especially the 100,000 plus folk who have joined the party since the far left led it to its worst result since the 1930s in December.

But now even the supposedly sensible Lisa – towns and tough-talking – Nandy is at it too, saying in an interview with BBC Radio 4 that Corbyn was treated badly. He wasn’t. Labour treated the country badly by trying to make him Prime Minister.

Appallingly, the best hope of those of us who want a strong opposition is that Starmer and Nandy are lying. A big lie about why Labour lost last year is not the best basis on which to start out as leader.

Any honest attempt to get Labour back in business as a serious party would require, instead, as a prerequisite a clean break with Corbyn, the far-left infiltrators and Communist Corbynite new media loonies.

Voters in Labour areas surely deserve an apology for the last four years. The patriotic party of Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan, Smith, Blair and Brown, put up a totally calamitous figure. The voters duly saw through him and judged him to be someone who doesn’t like this country, who always sides with Britain’s enemies. He was an incredible candidate for Prime Minister. That is, he was not remotely credible.

If you try this sustained muppetry on the country as a political party you had better not – if you want to be listened to again by reasonable people – say that it wasn’t his or your fault. That it was the BBC. Or the newspapers. People are not stupid. They rumbled Corbyn and Labour and they were right.

Acknowledging this is will be a crucial first step in the difficult battle facing a new leader of the opposition, who must on victory earn the right to be heard. This matters because history suggests the British make up their minds about opposition leaders – is he or she potentially up to it or not? – relatively early on in the process.

There is a reasonable, non-hysterical way to create distance between a candidate and their predecessor. Boris Johnson showed how it is done. He didn’t personally trash Theresa May when he was running to become her successor. Yet everything he did was underpinned by a determination to define himself as 180 degrees removed from May, at least in rhetoric and presentation. What would May do? Do the opposite. What would May say? Instead, say we are not continuing with the failed approach of the past.

The electorate – the Tory members and then the wider country – understood this. Boris represented a break with national failure.

In endorsing Corbyn, Starmer and Nandy have endorsed Labour’s failure. The voters are not fools. They will notice.