The sight of grown men spitting "throwback moron" and "red Tory" at one another can be highly entertaining, when the fallout is on someone else's patch. But the internal warfare that heralded the rise of Jeremy Corbyn did more than expose the stupidly, simplistic binaries of compassion versus corporatism. It opened up the whole question of political remembering and forgetting. "Let's not go back to the 80s," implored a procession of New Labour big beasts, who still bear the scars of the internecine bloodletting of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the "longest suicide note" in history – ie the 1983 election manifesto.
Then a couple of hundred thousand voters not yet born in the 1980s stormed right past them, swearing fealty to the man plunging a stake into their New Labour project. What were Blair et al thinking? What do the 1980s even mean to a 21-year-old?
Back here, the bank guarantee is already seven years old. That's a third of a 21-year-old's life. How many of them are going to parse and analyse who said what at the banking inquiry and how that compares with what they said before or after the guarantee? Come to think of it, how much electoral gratitude will come the way of the elected members of that inquiry, who made genuine sacrifices to stay the course in that Leinster House basement?
Memory is dead. Donald Trump, the master of simplistic binaries and political forgetting, has buried it: "Our leaders are stupid, our politicians are stupid . . . This place is a mess." Genius. The man is now the Republican front-runner for the US presidency by a mile.
Really, who wants to hear about Ruairí Quinn's prudent husbanding of the exchequer that handed a dream start to Bertie Ahern in 1997? Or that back in the day, Fianna Fáil tried to abolish proportional representation not once, but twice? What matters is the here and now.
In that context, any discussions about a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil coalition/merger seem stunningly irrelevant. Who cares any more if a couple of grey, old parties coalesce? Look around. We live in a world where the unthinkable has become commonplace.
The political landscapes that led to the power surge of the Scottish Nationalists and Syriza, for instance, were imperceptible to many only a few months before their electoral triumphs. We’ve grown accustomed to bright, charismatic young leaders casting off the shackles of the past, leading new movements, seeking a new way of doing politics.
Untested by power
As a brand new party, Syriza brought a unique, essential quality to the unspeakably bleak, Greek landscape. It was “neither indebted nor connected to the past . . . [It was] like a national spring clean”, said writer
Alex Andreou
. But what if the price for that break with the past includes a prime minister entirely untested by power and a finance minister who has spent his whole working life in academia?
Back in Britain, a whole other experiment is under way, where the Labour party’s electoral whirlwind has produced the requisite break from the past in the form of a new leader. Except this one turns out to be 66, with a history of voting against his own leadership more than 500 times in 32 years. Even within the governing party, Corbyn’s sustained his politics of protest. Whether he was right or wrong in those battles is for another day.
The point is that while accustomed to rejecting power, he is entirely untested by it, and is now wading into battle with a shadow cabinet of untested unknowns.
Almost all of Labour's experienced spokespeople have walked away, an act former deputy leader, Roy Hattersley described as "self-indulgent nonsense", since it leaves the hard left in charge. Listening to Corbyn's leadership acceptance speech, said Hattersley, was like travelling 40 years back in time – and not in a good way. Already one of Corbyn's inner circle has called for "mandatory reselection" for MPs who fail to conform to the new orthodoxy. A rich irony if you're Corbyn, who never saw any good reason to toe the party line but chose not to leave either.
Tedious stuff
He chose to contest for the leadership of an old party, not a scintillating new one. Now he has to do all that tedious stuff entailed in being a party leader – try to unite the profoundly divided membership, find donors, review his scary foreign policy stances; above all, make the party electable among that moderate majority that lies vaguely, inconveniently, skittishly, between the Marxists and the fat cats.
Next on the agenda will be the several hundred thousand, excited young people who paid their £3 to sign up and vote for Jez. Where will they be come the 2020 election? Maybe political memory isn’t such a dull old subject after all.
Maybe the unimpeachably decent Corbyn can confound the doomsayers. He turned up in parliament on Monday dressed in a suit and tie – possibly for the first time ever – and told interviewers he will not be engaging in the moronic putdowns and animal noises that passes for debate. “It’s all great fun and jolly japes when you’re in there but it doesn’t mean anything to the people that really look to their politicians to do something . . .” Jez, I salute you.