The Labour left was not scrabbling to save the blushes of Corbyn. Rather, it was seeking to frame the inevitable battle for the soul of the party in its own terms. For decades, the left longed to hold the levers of power in Labour, and it will not release its grip without a fight.
Blaming the historic drubbing on anything other than the left-wing leader and his policy platform was a no-brainer. The Labour left needed a scapegoat, and Brexit, an obvious factor in the defeat but far from the whole story, was it.
After the 2017 election, in which Corbyn deprived Theresa May of a majority, many critics of the leader in the centre and centre-right of the party sucked up their differences and put on a united front. Despite splits over Brexit deepening the rifts in the shadows, Corbynism became a vast umbrella under which various factions could sit, claiming to be represented by the squirming, triangulating positions the Labour leader settled on over different issues. [...]
The difficulty for the contestants is that Labour is an unpredictable beast. The 500,000-strong membership, many of whom joined the party in 2015 specifically to elect Corbyn into the top job, is pro-EU, pro-left and pro-Corbyn.
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