Alastair Campbell is damaged goods, but his message should sharpen the knives for a Labour coup

New Labour’s lords of entitlement were never keen on Marxist orthodoxies. But Alastair Campbell’s distaste now extends beyond Karl, and all the way to Groucho.

Flipping the latter’s best known quote on its head, Campbell has decided he wouldn’t want to be a member of a club that won’t have him for a member.

So he will not be fighting his expulsion from Labour (for voting Lib Dem in the European elections), as he reveals in an open letter to Jeremy Corbyn that doubles up as a bog-standard dismantling of its addressee.

Corbyn has been so starved of good news lately that he may be forgiven for confusing this with a godsend. Admittedly, any attack from as despised and mistrusted a voice is useful in the short term. For a day or two, it will probably shore up Corbyn’s increasingly disaffected base – or that part of it which is old enough to recall Campbell’s enduringly toxic contribution to national life.

However dismally lethargic Corbyn’s handling of Brexit and antisemitism, morally he is a colossal improvement on Tony Blair and the distempered pitbull with the bagpipes who did his bidding on Iraq.

Campbell’s lack of ironic self-awareness never fails to amuse. “He is a liar,” he tweeted today of Dominic Raab, whose claim to have warned about the risk of no deal during the referendum is provably false. “Which is why the liar in chief gave him the job.”

Who else could have written those words without appreciating how perfectly they apply to Blair and himself? It might be his daftest tweet since June 2012, when he accused Armando Iannucci of selling out by accepting an OBE. “You see, your wit a bit tired and blunt already. Three little letters can have more impact than you realise.”

“WMD” Iannucci tweeted back at him, and that was an end to that.

There is no end to the seething rage of Campbell and his fellow residents in the Bide-A-Wee Retirement Home for Labour Neo-Thatcherites. They are pathologically incapable of accepting that the movement they regard as their personal fiefdom is under alien control.

This makes it difficult to resist dismissing his epistle as the usual sore-loser rancorous bleatings. But it’s worth making the effort, because on the stopped clock principle even he must be right from time to time.

In this case, his analysis is crude, simplistic, unoriginal, and accurate. Corbyn and his elite corps of advisers show no understanding of the extreme peril of the situation, as he writes – and less of having any strategy, or even wanting to develop one, to counter Boris Johnson and his madcap lurch towards no deal.

“I fear the country may already have decided that it does not intend to make you prime minister,” he goes on. “I do not blame you for Brexit and the mess the UK is in ... But I do believe your half-hearted approach to the referendum campaign ... had a role in Leave winning. Your failure to provide consistent leadership on the issue since then has been a huge disappointment.”

One could quibble about the word “consistent”, which seems generous, but nothing else. We are watching a tragedy unfold in super-slow mo. Opportunities for a progressive government fiercely committed to the deprived and dispossessed come seldom, and only then in the aftermath of war or some other huge national trauma. It is heartbreaking to see this one having its throat slit on the twin altars of dogmatic intransigence and rank incompetence.

There will be those closer to Corbyn than Campbell who privately agree with him. The question is whether any of them will do so publicly before it is too late.

History has a habit of turning on inaction. If David Miliband, the prince across the water of whose unlikely return Campell doubtless dreams, had ousted Gordon Brown in 2009, Britain would probably have avoided the age of austerity that was the flu-like symptom to the bubonic plague of Brexit.

I’ve no idea whether John McDonnell, Emily Thornberry and other key players ever dwell on the ramifications of Miliband’s banana yellow streak. If they don’t, they should.

A decade ago, a courageous act of euthanasia towards a mortally wounded leader could have spared this country so much grief. One now might just spare us incalculably more.

Those on the Labour front bench who share Campbell’s pessimism may not have the power to oust him.

But if they believe he will entrench Johnson and his cabal of effete gangsters in government; if they think his lethargy will enable the nightmare of nightmares on Halloween, they have the clearest duty to try.

For McDonnell, the clash of loyalties would be particularly horrendous after being personally and politically close to Corbyn for almost half a century.

But if he does agree with Campbell and all available polling that Corbyn’s refusal to commit unequivocally to staying in the EU makes a general election unwinnable, he will be complicit in the defeat unless he does whatever he can to avoid it. Every inch as complicit as Blair’s supine cabinet in the invasion of Iraq.

Campbell’s central role in that devalued the coinage of his opinions among the Labour left so absolutely that his critiques are worth literally less than nothing. Their value is entirely to Corbyn himself.

But Labour is stumbling towards disaster under a leader who palpably cannot lead. We all know that everyone said the same in 2017, and came to look silly for having said it. We also know the cliche about bad generals fighting the last war.

Campbell’s message is sound, it only awaits the right messenger, and the doomsday clock is tick-tocking more menacingly by the hour.