‘History is written by the victors’ is a well-worn quote, most frequently attributed to Winston Churchill although its origins remain unknown. In contemporary Britain, it certainly seems apt.

As the coronavirus pandemic forces us to comprehend the full ramifications of years of Tory austerity on the NHS, it may be tempting to dismiss the truly shocking allegations in the recently leaked Labour report. “Corbyn era infighting,” as one former minister put it. Move on, nothing to see here. 

But the subsequent intervention of Peter Mandelson, himself forced to resign from the cabinet on two separate occasions, and who accused those behind the report of “trying to re-write history,” must set the alarm bells ringing very loudly indeed. In many ways the report details the continuation of an internal party culture Mandelson helped to create – and his comments today should remind every Labour member that, after almost three decades, Labour’s Augean stables desperately need to be cleaned.

For the newly-elected Labour leader Keir Starmer and his deputy, Angela Rayner, this is a very clear challenge and one to which the inquiry they have recently announced must rise to. I wish them well in this endeavour. And, more importantly, when this issue has been satisfactorily resolved, I trust them to help us finally achieve that elusive victory that the party came so close to achieving in 2017.

It might even have been achieved but for the actions of Labour’s own self-serving, circular firing squad. The report’s revelations make clear how damaging their behaviour was. In order to prosper, Labour will need a party staff that works and behaves as the professional civil service it once was, and a parliamentary party that manages to observe its own code of conduct – something that sections of it have manifestly failed to do in recent years. Get this right and Labour may cease to look and sound like the new nasty party. 

I have known every party leader since, and including, James Callaghan. I shared an office with one, worked directly for another when he went on to serve the United Nations. I served as a fairly longstanding member of the party’s ruling National Executive Committee under yet another. Some, clearly, I was more enthusiastic about than others. I watched as Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and Gordon Brown were savaged by a frequently voracious tabloid media as the commentariat tended to look on or joined in. But none of this was in preparation for the avalanche that descended upon that most unlikely and reluctant of leaders, Jeremy Corbyn. 

Let us be absolutely clear about recent history before Peter Mandelson and his friends try to cover their messy tracks. Let’s not forget, as we do so, that Machiavelli’s poor relation once boasted that he tried to undermine Jeremy Corbyn “every single day.” In any other organisation, such serial mutiny would have resulted in expulsion. 

Corbyn’s very candidature for leader was deemed illegitimate, both by sections of the parliamentary party and some of the party’s staff. His victory was deemed illegitimate by the same; his election met with a stone-wall of silence and shuffling feet. He was lumbered with a serially disloyal deputy in the shape of Tom Watson, who had graduated from the party’s library, through the bowels of the old engineering union, the AEU, to life as a career plotter and a clumsy one at that. 

Even when Corbyn saw off the plotters’ revolt and was re-elected for a second time, the sullen rebellion continued. The media duly took its cue. In 2016, Michael Lyons, a former chair of the BBC Trust said that the BBC may have bowed to political pressure to show bias against Labour and Jeremy Corbyn and acknowledged that there had been “some quite extraordinary attacks on the leader of the Labour Party.” 

The BBC has more than its fair share of editors who have been shaken out of a declining Fleet Street. Force of habit perhaps has them taking their story lead from the morning newspapers. Either way, if sections of your parliamentary party believes their leader to be illegitimate and are determined to oppose him, while senior party staff openly work to sabotage from within, it is hardly surprising that open season from the media begins on the Labour leader. In Jeremy Corbyn’s case this was often literally on his own doorstep.

History will record that, despite all this, Labour almost won the 2017 general election. Peter Mandelson, taking a five minute break from his plotting, announced himself “surprised.” “I didn’t think that he had it in him,” he said of Corbyn. No matter, normal service was soon resumed. George Orwell was one of Tribune’s best known writers and literary editors. In 1937 he wrote, “the ideal of Socialism has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles, and half-baked ‘progressivism’ until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again.”

When Neil Kinnock made the terrible error of appointing Peter Mandelson Labour’s director of communications in 1985, the dung began to accumulate, and fast. The party’s slow metamorphose into a McKinsey-light political machine ultimately led Mandelson to claim that those who didn’t like ‘New’ Labour, would have “nowhere else to go.” They did of course have plenty of places to go and many have now gone – beginning in Scotland but now evident, too, in the party’s former heartlands.

Underpinning the Blairite reinvention of Labour was a top down command-and-control blueprint that long ago I discovered had been given to Mandelson by his old friend John Birt, then similarly engaged in a project to turn the BBC into some weird kind of management consultancy. ‘Command-and-control’ transmogrified into ‘partnership in power,’ which was New Labour’s project to deprive the party’s conference or parliament of any meaningful say over policy, weaken the party’s National Executive Committee and most importantly, control the selection of the party’s candidates at local and national level.

Throughout the Blair years, parliamentary candidates were parachuted into ‘safe’ Labour seats with a degree of brazenness never seen before. It began with Liz Davies, who had been selected to fight a seat in Leeds, but whose candidature was overturned in a Salem-inspired, and often very public, witch trial. Liz and I went on to win places on the party’s National Executive Committee as party members reacted strongly to what was to become known as ‘control freakery’. The party was now run by a narrow cabal of fixers who saw their job as frustrating the members and shutting down political debate at all costs.

I am familiar with and know many of the party officials who face investigation, including the former general secretary, Iain McNicol, who was finally extricated through dispatching him to the House of Lords. Many more have long left the party’s employ. Personally, I had a fairly good relationship with many of them before I moved to New York in 2005 to first cover and then work for the United Nations. Quite when, amongst some of them, an engrained political hostility to simple dissent became a baleful contempt for their party’s leader and election chances, is anyone’s guess.

But this is why it would be a mistake simply to half-heartedly throw the book at some party officials gone rogue, without ensuring that the abusive and destructive behaviour that has run through Labour for many years is tackled head on. The fact is that figures like Mandelson helped to create a culture in the Labour Party in which contempt for its elected leader, and the democratic mandate of its members, was seen as the norm. They built a political machine which has proven incapable of adapting to new mandates – choosing instead to revolt and trash the very party which built it.

As Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner survey the ruins and begin to think of laying new foundations, they are at least in a better place to begin with. Thus far, there have been no attempts to delegitimise their convincing election victories. Tribune, along with other left-wing outlets, congratulated them and wished their shadow cabinet well. But now they face the reality of how dysfunctional the party has become. They must move quickly and with determination to ensure that the contamination that characterised the Corbyn era does not begin all over again.