Whoever becomes Labour leader today, one positive outcome is assured: no one will regard them as the Messiah. They will be treated as a flawed invidual who makes mistakes & can be criticised without disloyalty. That ends the single most destructive element of recent Lab politics.

Messianic politics *never* produces good outcomes because there are no political Messiahs. So every fault must be denied, every complaint dismissed as a smear. Every critic must be burned as a heretic and every failure blamed on unbelievers. It's morally and politically ruinous.

From Thatcherism to Brexit to Corbynism, the politics of gods & monsters *always* ends in holy war. Margaret Thatcher once said, "I came into politics because of the conflict between good and evil". She believed that as strongly as anyone on the left, & it did not serve her well.

Gladstone, another highly moralistic leader, once summed up his politics as follows: "I believe in the Fall. In sin. In the intensity & virulence of sin. Sin is the great fact of the world to me". Crucially, that included his own. It's not a bad starting point for politics today.