As voting closes...

Voting on the leadership and deputy-leadership of the Labour Party has just closed. And, as an interim guide to form, I've checked up on the traffic generated on this blog by the portraits I wrote of the various candidates. There are, it has to be said, no surprises.

The share of the total number of page views achieved by each candidate is as follows:

Leader:
Jeremy Corbyn    58%
Andy Burnham    15%
Yvette Cooper     14%
Liz Kendall           13%

Deputy leader:
Angela Eagle        28%
Stella Creasy        26%
Caroline Flint        18%
Tom Watson        16%
Ben Bradshaw     13%

The order in the leadership category reflects the result that pretty much everyone expects, though I want to put on record one last time my dissenting view: I still think Yvette Cooper is going to win. I'm not sure what conventional wisdom says about the deputy leadership, but I believe Tom Watson is still favourite.

If it goes to form, then, by this time on Saturday, the Labour Party will be led by Jeremy Corbyn and Tom Watson, two white men with an average age of 57, who both came into politics as unelected advisers to trade unions. Let no one say that the party hasn't embraced modern Britain in all its wondrous diversity.

Brother, don't you walk away

Yvette Cooper's speech yesterday, in which she called on the government to respond more positively to the refugee crisis spilling over from the Arabic world, has rightly been acclaimed for its statement of basic humanity. But there's one bit that I think is a little misleading.

'Hungary and Sweden have had three times the number of asylum claims as Britain,' she pointed out, 'even though they are smaller countries.'

Well, yes, that's true, but is it relevant? Is land area the correct measure for the proper allocation of refugees? Other people have recently attempted to shame Britain by producing figures showing number of refugees accepted in relation to national population. And again, that doesn't necessarily seem relevant.

Personally, I don't think it's sensible or right to try to make such comparisons at all. Cooper's core argument is sufficient - that it's simply wrong to turn away from such a crisis: 'It's immoral, it's cowardly and it's not the British way.' This attempt to quantify our obligations is misguided.

Apart from anything else, if we are to draw up league tables, then neither area nor population is sufficient, since these don't confront the most commonly heard claim: that 'Britain is full'. If we're going to use a measure to compare countries, then surely the more appropriate method would be to factor in both area and population, by looking at density.

So I thought I'd post some graphs, to see if it helped at all. These are the population densities of the fifteen most populous countries in the European Union:

The UK is the third most densely populated of the major European nations, though it should be noted that there's a pretty steep fall-off after the top two. But you can see the pointlessness of Cooper's comment about Sweden: the geography of the place means it's not really comparable, so why compare?

If we then break down the constituent countries of the UK, you get this result:

To put that in the context of the first graph: Wales and Northern Ireland would come between Italy and the Czech Republic in the top half, while Scotland comes in just above Sweden at the bottom. England, meanwhile, has almost exactly the same population density as the Netherlands, despite having an area more than three times the size.

But that's not really enough information either, because of the vastly disproportionate size of England compared to the others. So, breaking it down further, we can separate out the English regions and include them along with Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland:

Which would suggest that London is somewhat skewing the figures. London really is full, while Scotland's virtually empty.

Apart from that, I'm not sure we get very far. As I say, I'm not convinced that these things help any discussion of immigration or asylum. Better to stick with Cooper's moral message: 'How can we be proud of our history of helping those who fled conflict if our generation turns its back?'

A question of priorities

So this is how I'm planning to vote in the Labour leadership:

And this is how I shall vote in the deputy leadership contest:

The Labour leadership

Should I have the right to vote in the Labour leadership election? I've never been a member of the party. I have voted for it on several occasions, but then on other occasions I've voted for around half-a-dozen other parties, plus a couple of independents. It's not just that I'm not tribal; it's that I wouldn't actually call myself a Labour supporter.

But that's what I am now. I paid my three quid and I'm officially a registered supporter of the Labour Party. I had to declare that I agreed with the aims and values of the party, of course, but that wasn't too hard, since the new Clause IV introduced by Blair was deliberately mushy and meaningless. Do I approve of a world 'where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect'. Yes, that sounds quite agreeable. Who's going to argue? (Apart from the likes of Nick Griffin, Robert Mugabe and Donald Trump.)

So it turns out that I do have the right to vote. Morally and politically, Labour may have been daft to sell me that right, but I've got it now. And I'm doing my best to use it dutifully, because - as Clause IV says - 'the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe'. And I've promised Labour that I'm in agreement with that.

I'm taking this vote seriously. Over the last fortnight I've written around fifteen thousand words as I've worked my way through newspaper archives, trying to get a clearer picture first of each of the candidates for deputy leader, and now those contesting the leadership: Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham and Jeremy Corbyn.

My aim has been to identify the candidates who I think are best for the Labour Party. Not, you'll notice, for the country. And certainly not for me.

Because I'm shallow and easily bored. I like to see Westminster as a soap opera and I like big storylines.

In an ideal world, my preference is for all four of the major national parties to break up and to regroup in a different arrangement. The current set-up isn't working. Better than that, I'd like to see proportional representation so that we could have more parties, For a start, in my new improved system, there'd be four Labour parties, one each for Scotland, Wales, England and London.

But that's not on offer. And anyway I think it would be dishonest and dishonourable of me to abuse my place as a guest of the party by trying to trash the place. So I shall be respectful, and be guided by the consideration of who will stand the best chance of helping Labour rebuild and go on to contest a general election.

Not that I think any of them are in with much of a shout of winning in 2020, so steep are the odds against the party. But denying the Tories a majority is well within Labour's grasp, and even a minority government is a reasonable aspiration.

In that process, I don't believe that policy is particularly important. Broad direction and philosophy count, but detailed policies don't.

And, one final consideration, I know that it's not a very inspiring slate of candidates. As I've said before, it's probably the worst in my lifetime - worse even than in 2007, when there was only one name on the ballot paper and that belonged to Gordon Brown.

But still, despite all the limitations, despite everything, a choice has to be made.

And my decision is that I shall cast my vote for Liz Kendall.

Which has come as a surprise to me. She was probably in third place in my mind when the deadline for nominations arrived. But the more I think about the state of the party, the more I think that she's the only one who might stand a chance of winning the seats that Labour needs to win.

She's ludicrously inexperienced and has yet to display the kind of leadership that she would need, but I think she has the potential to do so. Certainly she seems to be the only one capable of thinking new thoughts and arguing for a new position. Neither Burnham nor Cooper have distinguished themselves in this campaign.

The only other serious candidate is, bizarrely, Jeremy Corbyn. Not for anything he's done, more for the campaign that has grown up around him. There is an argument to be made that he stands far and away the best chance of bringing back some nationalist voters - those who opted for UKIP or the SNP in the general election - and might get a few Greens on board. There might also be a rise in turnout in safe Labour seats. Those new recruits, however, would, I'm convinced, be massively outweighed by a voting collapse in the South and the Midlands, precisely the areas where Kendall would be strong.

I don't believe that the surge in membership is stable or sustainable, and I suspect most of the new recruits will melt away regardless of the outcome of this election. Nor have I seen any evidence that Corbyn's supporters have the ability, or even inclination, to persuade doubters. There is also the impression of disunity that would be given by Corbyn's parliamentary colleagues. This may not be the direct consequence of Corbyn's actions, but it is the political reality. And I cannot see how he could command support in the country if he couldn't get it in the Commons.

And talking of reality: I recognise that Kendall isn't going to win. I understand you can get odds of 100-1 against her doing so, which in a four-horse race isn't too impressive. Which means that, as things currently stand, I think the Tories will win the next general election.

Human till she talks: a portrait of Yvette Cooper

One of the standard jokes at the start of the current Labour leadership election was that Yvette Cooper's judgement has to be suspect: after all, she did marry Ed Balls. Not very funny, I know, and also deeply unfair, because on the plus side they chose Eastbourne for their wedding, she wore Vivienne Westwood for the ceremony, and they went to Euro-Disney for their honeymoon. Which deals with the lack of judgement charge.

In general, of course, it's unfair to reflect on a politician's partner, but in the case of the first husband and wife team to serve in a British cabinet, it's kind of inevitable. For nearly two decades, they've been seen as a single force. As a magazine pointed out in 1998, Cooper and Balls were 'New Labour's It Couple, the zenith of everything it stands for.' A Daily Telegraph profile of the pair the same year was headlined: 'Will this couple make it to Number 10?' Or, as the Guardian put it, they were 'the Posh and Becks of the Labour Party'.

Born in 1969, Yvette Cooper studied PPE at Oxford and went on to become an adviser to John Smith and to Harriet Harman. (My apologies for the repetitions in this series of portraits, but there really is a shocking lack of variation in the backgrounds of the candidates.)

She also worked for a while in journalism, as a leader writer and as the economics correspondent for the Independent. She was perfectly okay, and occasionally wandered out of her field. This is her on the supposed crisis in masculinity that was such a big media deal in the 1990s:

The only thing these men really have to adjust to is change itself. No, they can't have a job for life anymore. But so what? Few women ever had one. And no, they can't invest their entire identity in the firm they work for: the company might not be there in two years. And if they are too frit to visit their GPs they had better reconcile themselves to early avoidable death.

No tolerance for the nanny state here, then; you sink or swim according to your own efforts.

Her articles tended to be broadly supportive of the Labour Party in opposition, but even she struggled to put a positive gloss on Tony Blair at times, and had to concede that his borrowing of Will Hutton's 'stakeholding' concept was little more than, in her word, 'waffly'.

Her ambitions, however, lay in Parliament not Fleet Street. Under the patronage of Gordon Brown, she attempted to become the candidate for the safe seat of Don Valley, where she lost out to Caroline Flint, before securing the nomination for the even safer Pontefract & Castleford, where she beat both Hilary Benn and Derek Scott (Tony Blair's economic adviser, who later wrote Off Whitehall).

She was one of ten Labour MPs elected in the 1997 landslide who were still in their twenties, and was clearly marked out for early advancement.

When Brown announced that he was handing over control of interest rates to the Bank of England, it was Cooper - just four days into her parliamentary career - who was sent onto Newsnight to defend the move to Jeremy Paxman. 'With that one step,' she wrote, 'the government has done more to achieve economic stability than anything any British government has done for years.' She brushed aside suggestions that the move was an affront to democracy: in characteristic New Labour style, managerialism was more important than politics.

Shortly after the election, Cooper and Balls - the archetypal North London couple - moved from Hackney to the New Labour heartland of Islington, though they later moved again, this time to upwardly mobile Stoke Newington. For expenses purposes, this was, of course, their second home, entitling them to a subsidised mortgage. When such things began to provoke outrage, it was reported that between them they had 'racked up more than £300,000 in expenses' in 2006-07, considerably above the national average for MPs.

From a whip's perspective, her behaviour in Parliament was exemplary, largely - one suspects - because she was a genuine believer in the Blair-Brown 'project'. The Demon Ears column in the Observer concluded that she 'isn't that bad for a New Labour MP, even though she does dream on message'.

By October 1998 she was being offered a minor government post, though she turned it down in favour of remaining a member of the intelligence and security committee. It proved to be only a short delay: the following year she took on the public health portfolio, becoming the youngest minister in Blair's administration. She then went on to become the first minister to say she'd once smoked pot and, admirably, didn't claim not to have liked it: 'I did try cannabis while at university, like a lot of students at that time, and it is something that I have left behind.'

In her new role she was partly responsible for the cross-departmental project Sure Start, widely seen as one of the better initiatives of New Labour. Its fanbase was wide enough to include, slightly oddly, a children's TV favourite: 'Peppa Pig is a well-known fan of Sure Start children's centres,' it was revealed in 2010.

Less successful was the idea of a crusade against teenage pregnancies under the slogan 'It's OK to be a virgin'. Cooper had sufficient political nous to reject that in favour of 'a straightforward campaign which gives teenagers the facts and is aimed as much at boys as at girls'.

She moved to the Lord Chancellor's department in 2002, then to environment, transport and the regions, where she became minister of state for housing and planning.

The latter portfolio did not count among New Labour's great achievements: during Blair and Brown's period in office, an average of 562 council homes were built each year, compared to the annual average of 41,343 during Margaret Thatcher's premiership.

Cooper did little to improve this woeful record, but she did do some things. She relaxed the regulations on householders installing small windmills and solar panels, and she piloted the chaotic introduction of Home Information Packs. She also faced criticism for allowing more house-building on flood plains. And she suggested that middle-aged couples in social housing should be encouraged to move out of cities when their children left home, to free up housing stock. Her concern here was over 'underoccupied' social housing, an issue later addressed - in somewhat more heavy-handed manner - by the Coalition government's bedroom tax.

When Gordon Brown became prime minister, she remained as housing minister but was given a new right to attend cabinet meetings, and then, in 2008, she made the cabinet proper as chief secretary to the Treasury. Just in time for the credit crunch, though happily she didn't stay very long. As Brown's government descended into a farce of resignations, her loyalty was rewarded with a further promotion, and she served out the rest of the New Labour years as work and pensions secretary, inheriting the agenda set by her predecessor James Purnell.

She spent most of the Ed Miliband era as shadow home secretary, one of the easiest jobs in politics, since there's always something going wrong in the Home Office to provide you with ammunition. This was, famously, where Tony Blair had made his name in 1992-94 in his 'tough on crime' days. But Cooper failed completely to make the same kind of impact and was largely invisible. 'Home secretary Theresa May was fighting for her political life last night as she was engulfed by the border checks scandal,' read the papers in 2011, but Cooper failed to exploit the situation, and of the two you'd probably bet on May being the one to make it to prime minister.

Perhaps, though, that job was a waste of her talent, which is much more obviously focussed on the economy. As shadow chancellor, she would have made a trickier opponent for George Osborne than did her husband.

Beyond economic matters, there has been much talk of women's issues, though sometimes this has been seen as being somewhat narrow in scope. Arguing, for example, in support of cuts to single-parent benefits in 1997, she displayed little interest in those who wished to concentrate on parenthood: 'It's a question of priorities. If we put resources into childcare and helping people back to work, we will raise the standard of living for the poorest.'

Similarly, she has repeatedly claimed over the last few years that 'David Cameron has a real problem with women'. This is an over-simplification, seeming to imply that women can be seen as a homogenous, metropolitan, professional block, somewhat in the image of Cooper herself.

The reality is that age is as big a factor as gender. At the election this year, according to Ipsos-Mori, Labour had a 20-percentage-point lead over the Conservatives among women aged 18-24, but trailed by 18 points among women over the age of 55. Unfortunately for Labour, which clearly has a real problem with older women, there are considerably more of them, and they're more likely to vote.

Cooper considered standing for the leadership in 2010, and Balls said that if she did so, he wouldn't stand himself. She decided against it, however, because she wanted to spend more time with her children. Five years on, and it was inevitable that she would be a candidate. By any normal standards, she really ought to be the front-runner, the one that the others have to beat. But that's not how it's worked out.

In 1997 she condemned - with complete justification - the Conservatives for their remoteness: 'They took politics far away from normal people's lives.' She points, with some justification, to Sure Start as her contribution to changing that, but as a politician, she herself doesn't seem to connect. There's something that isn't quite right. Perhaps Simon Hattenstone put his finger on it in the Guardian in 2010. 'It's funny that Cooper seems so human till she starts to talk,' he wrote, 'while Balls seems so monstrous till he starts.'

This is the third in a series of profiles of the four candidates in the Labour Party leadership election. Yesterday: Liz Kendall. Tomorrow: Jeremy Corbyn.

A throw of the dice

Throughout this Labour leadership contest, I've been predicting a victory for Yvette Cooper. Indeed I was predicting it in April before the general election. I don't like to change my predictions, so I won't. Despite everything, Yvette Cooper will become the leader of the Labour Party.

I am aware, however, that this is - to put it mildly - a minority position. And that I have no evidence for it whatsoever.

In fact, if I'd been paying attention to myself, I would have concluded that Jeremy Corbyn, currently the red-hot favourite, was the likely winner. 'New political forces will emerge, whether within the existing parties or outside of them,' I wrote in 2012; 'things are about to change quite radically.' I added last year that UKIP weren't that change. But maybe Corbyn is the catalyst for this change.

So let's assume that that I'm as wrong now as I was when I placed money on Peter Hain succeeding Tony Blair, the issue is whether Corbyn will be any good as leader.

There are three basic tasks for the opposition. First, that they oppose government policies by producing alternatives. Second, that those alternatives change the terms of the debate. Third, that by changing the debate, there comes at least a reasonable chance of winning the next election.

The first is where things have really gone wrong for the Labour establishment. Losing the election was disastrous, but Harriet Harman's call for MPs to abstain on welfare reform added insult to injury. It smacked of democratic centralism, implying that since the Tories had won the election, then their policies had to be accepted. The decision to abstain made no difference whatsoever to the outcome of the vote, but Harman has been around long enough that she should have got the grasp of symbolic gestures by now. And yet she blew it, and no other single event has done as much to strengthen Corbyn's cause.

Frankly, Corbyn couldn't make a worse fist of opposition than Harman already has.

His MPs, however, could make it much, much worse. If a significant number of them effectively refuse to accept the party's vote, then he will fail from the outset. And they may well do so. They could quote Tony Benn at a meeting of the shadow cabinet in 1970: 'When the boat is sunk, you can't exactly rock it.'

Assuming, though, that he could assert his authority of the parliamentary party, could Corbyn re-frame the national debate? Yes. Is it likely? No. He would have the entire media against him; not just the usual suspects, but the whole of what some like to call the legacy media.

And maybe in there is the hope: that social media and the revival of public meetings can bypass the newspapers and the broadcasters. Maybe Facebook and The Trews will eclipse the Daily Mail and the Ten O'Clock News as the source of political information. I'm not convinced. Not in the short-term. So it would require an active mass membership - in real life, not on the internet - to counteract media hostility. Again I'm not convinced. Nor do I see any sign of Corbyn supporters seeking to persuade, rather than to assert.

Could he offer the possibility of an election win? Well, very probably not. But honestly, you never really know. Labour winning in 2020 is such an uphill task anyway. Someone on Twitter (I apologise for forgetting who - let me know it was you) suggested that, if this were a dice game, Labour needed to throw a six to win, and that Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall could only manage threes and fours. Corbyn, on the other hand, offered the chance of either a one or a six.

Maybe. It is possible that Corbyn (Corbyn, of all people!) could build a People's Army that would massively outnumber Nigel Farage's following, a crusade that stretches far beyond Parliament. How this works within the existing Labour Party structure, however, I have no idea.

I have a fear that a Corbyn-led Labour might echo the miners' strike of 1984-85. There sprang up then a national network of support groups that was really quite extraordinary. It was, said the Financial Times, 'the biggest and most continuous civilian mobilisation since the Second World War'.

If you were involved, even in a peripheral way, with this movement, it was almost impossible to credit the opinion polls which showed the majority of the public firmly on the side of the government and against the NUM. But that was the reality. Most people didn't support the miners, and the result was one of the left's most celebrated of heroic defeats.

Back before Corbyn declared himself a candidate, I wrote: 'The task of choosing a new leader is to find someone who can articulate a sense of hope for the future, to persuade somewhere around a quarter of the electorate that he or she can help us build a better society.'

At the moment, there's only one candidate who's being seen in those terms. But I suspect there's only one six on his die (if that) and that the other faces are all ones. And I fear that Labour might actually need a double-six anyway.

I have yet to decide who to vote for. Over the course of the next week, I shall look back over the careers of the four candidates as a way of clarifying that question for myself. And I shall start tomorrow with Andy Burnham.

Chummy

One day someone should get Pete Frame to do a family tree of the New Labour spadocracy. This is an early attempt to make sense of the connections by the excellent Dan Atkinson, writing in the Guardian on 6 April 1995, long before they all became household names:

We know communitarianism is the vogue, but the Blair and Brown bunnies may be taking things too far. Ed Balls, he of endogenous growth and adviser to Mr Brown, is seeing Yvette Cooper, who has worked for Harriet Harman and is now on Gordon's payroll, too. Yvette is chummy with the fragrant Liz Lloyd, a researcher in Tony Blair's office. Liz's main squeeze is another Ed - the younger Miliband. He has also just started working for Gordon (if you want to rile the office, just ring and ask for 'Ed'). and his brother, David Miliband, is Liz's boss. The office politics must be worse than the real sort.

Leader of the gang

There's been a lot of very excited comment in the last day or so about how Jeremy Corbyn is on course to win in the Labour Party's leadership election. Round these parts, however, we try not to get over-excited. As The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy used to advise: Don't panic. Corbyn will not be the next leader. So who will?

Back in early April, I predicted that - following its inevitable defeat in the coming election - the party would opt for a female leader and choose either Yvette Cooper or Rachel Reeves. Since Reeves isn't standing, I'm going to have to stick with my other suggestion and predict a Cooper victory in September. She won't lead on first-preference votes, but I expect her to come through the middle and win in the third round.

She is not, in my opinion, the best choice that the Labour Party could make. But none of the three outsiders I nominated - Gloria de Piero, John Mann, Ben Bradshaw - took up the challenge, and we have instead the current dull slate of candidates. Of whom Cooper is probably the least poor.

Andy Burnham is the boring and unexceptional option, Jeremy Corbyn is the fascinating and catastrophic choice, and Liz Kendall - well, I don't know. I just don't get Kendall. In print, her arguments have some validity, but her delivery is as about as convincing as a student teacher. I simply can't picture her as a party leader, let alone prime minister. And I can at least see Cooper as a leader.

But Labour should have learnt at least one lesson from the last five miserable years. When the electorate tell you that your leader has a problem with credibility and image, then you should listen to them. Every single poll showed that Ed Miliband's popularity trailed that of his party. And Labour's response was to give us more Miliband, as though it were our fault: we simply hadn't understood how wonderful he was.

He wasn't. He was dreadful. And since his colleagues couldn't summon up the courage to remove him, they should have insisted on the next best strategy: don't focus exclusively on the leader.

The party would be wise to do so this time. Cooper is not a great candidate, by any means (though she's a huge improvement on Miliband), and she's not surrounded by the best generation of politicians in Labour's history. But then, the government - with a couple of exceptions - ain't much cop either. Collectively, Labour don't look any more incompetent than the Tories.

Here's a potential shadow cabinet line-up, with their counterparts in the real cabinet shown in brackets:

• Yvette Cooper - leader (David Cameron)
• Chuka Umunna - shadow chancellor (George Osborne)
• Alan Johnson - foreign affairs (Philip Hammond)
• Rachel Reeves - business (Sajid Javid)
• John Mann - home affairs (Theresa May)
• Keir Starmer - justice (Michael Gove)
• Hilary Benn - health (Jeremy Hunt)
• Caroline Flint - education (Nicky Morgan)
• Andy Burnham - work and pensions (Iain Duncan Smith)
• Gloria de Piero - energy and climate change (Amber Rudd)
• Liz Kendall - transport (Patrick McLoughlin)
• Dan Jarvis - defence (Michael Fallon)
• Michael Meacher - environment and food (Liz Truss)
• Stella Creasey - communities and local government (Greg Clark)
• Chris Bryant - culture, media and sport (John Whittingdale)
• Emma Reynolds - women and equalities (Nicky Morgan, again)
• Chris Leslie - shadow first secretary (Greg Hands)
• Jeremy Corbyn - international development (Justine Greening)
• Rosie Winterton - chief whip (Mark Harper)
• Ben Bradshaw - leader of the house (Chris Grayling)

Well, you can juggle them around a bit - even choose a different leader - but, member for member, I think Labour's line-up is probably stronger than that of the government. So the party should play to its strengths and emphasise the whole team. Don't just put the spotlight on the leader.

A couple of other things left over from Ed Miliband's doomed leadership.

The change in the rules for the election of the leader was a mistake. The idea of one-member one-vote was fine, but there should be some way of whittling down the cast-list before it goes to the vote. Much the same as the Tories do, where the MPs choose two candidates who are then put to the party membership. The point is that a leader spends most of their time working with parliamentary colleagues; if they can't command support there, then they stand no chance, regardless of what the party in the country thinks.

I know this doesn't always work smoothly in the Conservative Party. There have been two leadership elections since William Hague introduced the system, and one of them resulted in the absurd elevation of Iain Duncan Smith. I also know that Labour has a rule that a candidate needs the nominations of 20 per cent of MPs - but in the cases of Diane Abbott and Jeremy Corbyn, we have seen how flawed this would-be filtering mechanism is.

And finally, the one thing that Miliband did get right was his promotion of new talent. In 2011 I noted the appearance on consecutive days on Question Time and Any Questions of Gloria de Piero and Rachel Reeves, both of whom had only been elected the previous year and both of whom were already in the shadow cabinet.

'These are the potential stars of the next parliament being given a chance to get a bit of exposure and experience,' I wrote. I added: 'The unmistakable impression, however, is that Labour's given up on the idea of opposition for the immediate future and is building for the world after the next election.'

That world's now arrived, and Miliband's investment in apprentice politicians may now pay off.

The Sign of Four

Some first impressions from last night's Labour leadership debate...

There are some Conservative MPs, supporters and commentators who have found the candidature of Jeremy Corbyn to be really too terribly amusing. They would be wise to stop their chortling. First because it comes over as smart young people bullying an old man, which is the kind of impression Tories shouldn't be giving. And secondly because Corbyn speaks for Britain much more convincingly than they do.

Just to be clear. Obviously I don't think Corbyn is going to win the leadership. Nor do I think he should - he'd be a disaster beyond the nightmares of Iain Duncan Smith. The electorate wouldn't accept him for a moment and Labour would be destroyed.

Forget policies, however, and the values he espouses are not too far removed from the image the British have of ourselves as a nation. When he talks of principles of fairness and equality, of community and public services, he resonates in a way that Ed Miliband never achieved.

To take a more obvious example: Tony Benn was adopted as the nation's sweetheart when it became clear that his politics were never going to be implemented, so we could simply bask in the warm glow of his values. Corbyn is no Benn - he lacks the charisma and the easy humour - but he's as close as we've got, and his status will be raised by this campaign.

He knows he's not going to win the poll, but there's another process going on at the moment, a quest for the soul of the party, and he's making his contribution to that. He may at least change the rhetoric, which would be a start.

Of the others, Andy Burnham still comes across as a lightweight, as does Liz Kendall - though presumably there's some grit there, given her determination to be a candidate when she has so little to suggest she's a leader. And the most convincing of the four was Yvette Cooper.

I commented on Twitter earlier this week that none of the four candidates would have made it into one of Harold Wilson's cabinets, and that none would become prime minister. I should like to amend that a little. Cooper would have done well in Wilson's time. At her age she'd only be a minister of state right now, but a cabinet seat would be confidently predicted for her in a few years' time.

On the other hand, I still can't see her - or any of the others - as prime minister.

But these are early days. The only thing we know about the 2020 election is that the Tories won't be led by David Cameron. Like most people, I think George Osborne will be prime minister and that he'll win the next general election. But all sorts of things can go wrong. What if the Tories are stupid enough to choose Boris Johnson as their leader? Cooper could beat him.

One other thing: I'm glad that Labour is finally getting round to thinking about the idea that sometimes leaders have to be removed. The Conservatives are wonderful at this - they even got rid of Margaret Thatcher when they realised she'd become a liability (which she had). At various times there was plotting in Labour ranks against Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband - and not one person was ever prepared to stand against any of them. It can't go on.

Oh, and one other, other thing: I am aware of the many criticisms of Jeremy Corbyn - and the Left more widely - about how his hatred of Israel has led him into bed with some deeply unpleasant political figures and groups. Those criticisms are entirely justified. But I don't think that, for the public, this will damage the impression of a decent, principled man. (Unless he actually began to look like a serious candidate, of course...)

And, because I like him, I would like to note in his defence that he was one of the few MPs who still came to the non-stop picket of the South African embassy back in the 1980s, even though the group who organised that demonstration had been expelled from the mainstream Anti-Apartheid Movement. I spent quite a lot of time on those pavements and his support was a very good thing.

Labour leadership and the Magna Carta

The Labour government of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was not noted for its liberal tendencies. During Blair's premiership, this was symbolised by the attempt in 2006 to allow the state to detain 'terror suspects' for up to ninety days without charge. Just like in apartheid South Africa.

That attempt failed, but two years later - with Brown now prime minister - a new Counter-Terrorism Act plucked another figure out of the air, and sought to increase the maximum period of detention without charge from twenty-eight to forty-two days.

Thirty-six Labour MPs rebelled against this in a Commons vote, but it sneaked through when the Democratic Unionist Party ('the political wing of the 17th century, according to Owen Jones) was bribed by the Labour government to support the measure. It was not until the House of Lords voted against that the government dropped the proposal.

This occurs to me today for two reasons. One is that it's the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, which brings to mind Tony Benn's response to that Commons vote: 'I never thought I would be in the House of Commons on the day the Magna Carta was repealed.'

And the other reason is that today is the day that nominations close for the leadership of the Labour Party. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall already have enough to ensure that their names go on the ballot paper; at the time of writing, the support for Jeremy Corbyn's campaign is unsure.

Kendall was not a member of parliament in 2008, so didn't have a chance to express her opinion, but no one will be surprised that Burnham and Cooper happily trotted through the lobbies to support the forty-two days rule - this simply wasn't something worth risking their political careers on. Corbyn, equally unsurprising, was one of the rebels.

Election predictions

This is, according to David Cameron, the most important election in a generation. And, according to all commentators, it's the most unpredictable election since 1945.

The first claim is simply wrong, at least in the sense that Cameron means. The second is undeniably true. But that merely invites the making of predictions. There's no fun in predicting the inevitable; much more entertaining to commit oneself when there's every chance of being completely wrong. So, to launch this new incarnation of my blog, here is my prediction for the result of the forthcoming election:

There will be a Conservative government with a small majority.

And some more predictions... After the election, things get really interesting. That Conservative majority will wither on the vine in the heat of the EU referendum, and Ukip - having won fewer than five seats in the election - will blossom, fed by a steady stream of Tory defectors. And that will skew the balance of power within Ukip towards Douglas Carswell and away from Paul Nuttall, to the ultimate detriment of the party's fortunes. The defections will sufficiently panic the Conservatives that when Cameron steps down (having won the referendum), they will opt for Boris Johnson as leader, thereby ensuring that they lose the subsequent election.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party will decide it ought to have a woman as leader, and will choose Rachel Reeves over Yvette Cooper, thereby ensuring that they also lose the subsequent election.

Also choosing a new leader will be the Liberal Democrats. They won't perform disastrously in the election (though they'll win fewer seats than the SNP), but - finding they're not needed in government - they will go for a change anyway. The new leader will be Tim Farron, thereby ensuring that they do rather well in the subsequent election.

PS I would like to point out that on the day of the 2001 general election, I correctly predicted - against all conventional wisdom - that Iain Duncan Smith would take over as Tory leader. Since then, however, I've been wrong on almost every occasion. So if any of this turns out to be correct, I'll be trumpeting it for years to come.