To fulfil its historic mission, Labour must get into power. And to achieve that it has to win over sufficient layers of ‘middle Britain’ as well as maintain its core – though shrinking – support from both progressive middle-class and working-class voters. Under New Labour an absolute priority was given to winning the ‘middle’ on the assumption that the ‘core’ had nowhere else to go. A mistake, because actually, it did go elsewhere – either to another party or to stay at home.

Half of those saying in 2010 that they had voted Labour in the 2005 general election also said that they did not do so again five years later. They split almost equally in 2010 between not voting at all (23 per cent) and voting either Liberal Democrat (13 per cent), Tory (9 per cent) or other (4 per cent). In 2010 the other major parties held onto many more of their 2005 voters than Labour did: the Tories 76 per cent, the Liberal Democrats 58 per cent.

But the big winner in 2010 was the Why Bother? Party: 48 per cent of electors who had been too young to vote in 2005 said they did not vote at all in 2010. Staying at home is always an option. There is no comfort for Labour in learning that we had a big lead in each of the last four general elections among non-voters.

Thus it was that by 2010 under Gordon Brown New Labour had lost 5 million votes from its 1997 high, 4 million of these under Tony Blair, who in 2005 achieved a paltry 35.2 per cent (the lowest percentage for a winning party since 1918), nevertheless securing a comfortable Parliamentary majority, partly because first Iain Duncan Smith’s, then Michael Howard’s leadership made the Tories unelectable.

Therefore simply reincarnating New Labour, turning the Parliamentary Labour Party into Björn Again Blairites, is no formula for future success, no elixir for electoral victory – quite apart from its studied indifference to rising inequality, lofty disdain for working-class concerns and ideological incapacity to confront the systemic problems of the new capitalism.

Equally, however, neither a caricature ‘Old Labour’ recipe of extensive renationalisation and state control, nor a ‘Romantic Labour’ prospectus of profligate public spending, could be delivered in a world of globally mobile capital and footloose finance – and in any case would be even more unelectable.