“But do you seriously think Jeremy Corbyn can win an election?” That’s the standard opening gambit of the debate in its TV format, Blairite on one side, Corbynite on the other, impartial person mediating, in this curious world where impartiality starts from the position that the Labour party has just committed suicide.

The true answer is, I don’t know. Political landscapes, when they change, do so in an instant: it may have been 20 years in the making, but the earthquake that delivered Scotland to the SNP or Greece to Syriza looked, to determined supporters of the status quo, very much like politics as usual a month beforehand. There is absolutely no telling what common sense will look like in 2020. This conception of the nation, as a solid body of mainly centrist people, who all think broadly the same things, and are just waiting for someone photogenic to come along and articulate it, is fallacious. You only need to look at how much passes for mainstream thinking now that would have been considered right wing five years ago to know that the mainstream is a mirage, conjured by whoever makes the most persuasive case for their vision of it. Politics evolved into a set of value-free statements, propounded with infinite self-righteousness — but more relevant than not knowing is not caring: I don’t care whether or not Corbyn can win a general election. The important thing, ahead of winning, is to know why you want to win, and what you want to do with the victory. This is where old New Labour typically explodes in anger; it’s irresponsible and moronic to support someone unelectable; it gives the Conservatives a pass to execute their unrelenting evil; and besides, Cooper, Burnham, Kendall et al did have values.

Indeed they did: one of their values, as laid out before the leadership election to ward off interlopers, was “having strong values”. The others ranged from being broad to the point of meaninglessness (“social justice”), to being indistinguishable from Conservative values (“reward for hard work”) to being both meaninglessly broad and Conservative (“decency”; “rights matched by responsibilities”). I was always too polite to say this to the architects of New Labour: I do not know what Corbyn’s chances are five years from now, but I do know that the party whose values included “having strong values” was already dead. I know that appealing to the realpolitik of 1997, to people who had only just been born when Blair was elected, is not effective. I know that the Blair/Brown tug-of-phoney-war is no more relevant to the Labour party today than Wilson’s great success strategies were to Tony Blair.

Devilish alliances

The question, if you are prepared on this basis to defer the matter of electability, is whether or not a Corbyn-led Labour party can lodge effective opposition to the Conservative government. This should be asked in the context of a pre-Corbyn Labour party that was lodging no opposition at all (the failure to vote against the welfare bill was one of the most cynical and alienating acts I can remember). But also on the understanding that lacking the numbers to defeat anything straightforwardly, they are likely to suffer rebellions of their own, and are unlikely to lure any rogue Conservatives into clever and devilish alliances.

The first thing this new leadership will do — has already done — is to make the standard political interview, in which an MP, asked a variety of different questions, merely repeats the same line by rote, sound odd. Priti Patel’s interview with Iain Dale, peddling the threat posed by Jeremy Corbyn to people who work hard, was excruciating. Michael Fallon took up the same script, which then came out of the prime minster’s office on Sunday: “The Labour party is now a threat to our national security, our economic security and your family’s security.” We’ll come back shortly to the substance of that.

The Conservative party plainly didn’t invent the political soundbite; Ed Miliband’s agonising early misstep in 2011, when he repeated the same sentence six times, assuming the broadcaster would only show it once, was merely continuing the New Labour tradition in which the point of an interview was never to foster meaningful understanding, but to keep the conversation within the narrow parameters determined by the politician, in constant combat with the wider ranging ambitions of the interviewer.

MPs and journalists bicker tediously about whether this is the fault of evasive politics or a hostile press; this is not resolvable. It takes the collusion of everyone involved and is therefore, by definition, everybody’s fault. It is this style, even more than the similarity of outlook between the major parties, which caused the broadest disaffection with the political class.

People often characterise it as a failure of authenticity — why won’t politicians just say what they mean? But there’s more: blank failure to answer a straight question doesn’t make you look victorious, it makes you look slippery and dishonest. And yet, as that tactic became the norm, the delivery got more and more tendentious, so that politics evolved into a set of value-free statements, propounded with infinite self-righteousness. It’s been a process of abasement, which could only continue for as long as everybody did it. One politician answering questions as they are posed might be ceaselessly misrepresented for it, but he makes the others look absurd.

To move on to the Tory message — the threat that Labour now poses to national security, the economy and your family. The strategic choice of the Conservatives has always been to amp up the risks involved in thinking progressively. That was how they fought Scottish independence, and it’s how they fought the election of 2015, “Conservatives or chaos”. The unfortunate thing for their party machine is that this always relied on quite a significant overstatement of the difference between themselves and the Labour party. Now that the parties genuinely are different, they are forced to either abandon the tack or sound shrill. They may in time find a new way to argue, but currently, a prime minster warning you via Twitter that a man in a beard and a cardigan is going to threaten your family’s security sounds plain silly.

Corbyn himself has pinned a lot of his difference in opposition to the way he’ll handle PMQs: he will crowdsource the questions and won’t engage in the idiotic putdowns and wordplay that currently pass for great parliamentarianism. I don’t know how this will work practically, and I don’t know how many people will be attracted or repelled by a new kind of parliamentary badinage; I know very few people who watch PMQs, even among those who have to pretend to for their job. What is obvious, however, is that the new question for the opposition is not “how can we win?” but “who can we help?” The Blairite line is, nobody; not until you have the keys to No 10. If Corbyn can crack open the certainties of politics, so that the alienating verities of centrism, fake moderation and evasiveness have to cede to something more like a contest between genuinely different ideas, opposition may become a meaningful pursuit even while power is unknowably distant.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd