Right, so it's 2017.
Jeremy Corbyn, a man the British press had spent two years portraying as a one-man bearded apocalypse with an allotment, goes out and gets 40% of the vote, the biggest increase in Labour's vote share since 1945. Strong and stable Theresa May (who had called the election specifically to crush him) loses her majority and has to go and find some Northern Irish lads to prop her up, which cost £1 billion and the last remaining shred of her dignity.
Now, you or I watching this might think: *hm. Perhaps Corbyn’s policies have some popular appeal.* Morgan McSweeney watched this and thought: *this is a five-alarm emergency and I need to join a thinktank about unity.*
The thinktank was called Labour Together. Its public purpose (stated, printed, discussed at many a very sincere roundtable) was bringing the warring factions of the Labour Party into productive dialogue. Healing the wounds. Building bridges. All of that. Very moving stuff, I'm sure the biscuits were excellent.
McSweeney called his *actual* plan (the secret one, involving undeclared donor money and the systematic destruction of the Labour left) ..
... Operation Red Shield.
Yes, really. The shield. In the name. He called the deception after the deception. Nice.
I've spent some time thinking about this and I can only conclude that either he has a very specific sense of humour, or he'd had a bang on the head, or (and I think this is most likely) he was so confident nobody would ever find out that he just couldn't be bothered to be subtle about it, which is a level of arrogance that deserves, at minimum, a small plaque.
So. Undeclared donations (illegal, that bit, worth mentioning) from millionaire pro-Israel donors with connections to New Labour. Extensive secret polling of Labour members. All of it used to identify and cultivate a leadership candidate who could win the membership's trust, because McSweeney understood, correctly, that you need to speak their language to get through the door.
He chose Keir Starmer.
Starmer duly campaigned as a left-wing eco-socialist, defender of immigrants, challenger of corporate power, faithful inheritor of the Corbyn tradition. Ten pledges. Very specific. Written down and everything.
Within weeks of taking power he cut pensioners' heating allowances.
Now at this point a reasonable person might say, surely they must have had some kind of moderating influence? Some elder statesman in the background providing wisdom and ballast?
Yes. They had Peter Mandelson.
Mandelson, whose friendship with Jeffrey Epstein (who called him "Petey" .. please fetch me a sick bag) was not - and I want to be precise here - a closely guarded secret at the time of his appointment as US Ambassador. It was not, to borrow from Douglas Adams, buried in a filing cabinet in a basement in a disused toilet with a sign on the door saying "beware of the leopard". It was available for reading by people with access to *the internet*.
They appointed him anyway.
The people deemed too dangerous to govern, too radical, too risky, too friendly with the wrong sorts, were replaced by people who broke electoral law, secretly inflamed the antisemitism crisis to destroy their own leader, won power on promises they'd quietly binned before the ink was dry, and then, surveying the landscape of available talent, pointed at the man with the documented Epstein problem and said: *him. He's our safe pair of hands.*
Meanwhile Corbyn, the threat to civilisation, grows vegetables and makes jam.
The moral is right there, wearing a hat, waving at you from across the street. You can see it from your house.
*Next time: The Landslide That Wasn't. Or "how Keir Starmer won an historic national victory while losing half his own postcode."
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