Political column – December 21

Dr Watson leant forward, pulled back the red flag covering the grisly evidence, and pondered.

"It appears to be a body, Holmes."

"Excellent. How did it die?"

The clues were all about, yet the answer was a surprise even to Dr Watson.

"It appears to have been killed by The People," Watson said at length, with a shocked tone in his voice.

"Very good, very good! And now comes the most important point, Watson. Why?"

"Search me, Sherlock!"

As the inquest continues into the sad demise of the Labour Party after a catastrophic decline, the coroner's jury is having trouble reaching a verdict on the cause of death.

Labour MPs, what's left of them, who were once sheep, have now become wolves.

They snarled and growled at Jeremy Corbyn at a meeting at Westminster where the atmosphere was characterised by witnesses as anger, despair, and denial.

Defeat does awful things, and those Labour MPs have taken a terrible beating, or perhaps we should say terrible bleating to keep up with the sheep analogy.

But these are the MPs who in large part walked through the division lobbies with Mr Corbyn, who went along, or pretended to go along, with the Corbyn project as they hoped it would be all right on the night, and defended Labour's convoluted policy on Brexit on the radio and before the television cameras.

Labour MPs are absolving themselves of any personal responsibility for the disaster by an all-encompassing Corbyn-is-to-blame excuse, just as MPs from all sides who blithely backed the Iraq War afterwards distanced themselves from the consequences by claiming that they were misled by Tony Blair. Wasn't it their job to ask searching questions and hold him to account?

MPs are not sheep-like or stupid unless they choose to be sheep-like and stupid. Having examined their consciences and vindicated their conduct, their preferred explanation for the Labour northern wipeout is that it was all down to Jeremy, the Labour leader, who was a turnoff for the voters.

But the trouble with putting it entirely down to that is that Mr Corbyn has not been a leader in the traditional sense. He's been a follower. Ask him for his policy, and he'll say he's waiting for a decision from the party conference, National Executive Committee, the Cabinet, or whatever. Consensus is his middle name, or could be, if it wasn't Bernard.

Even after Russian agents launched a nerve agent attack on the streets of Britain, his preferred response was to seek the views of the Russians to see if they thought they might be behind it.

And if they really are entirely blaming Mr Corbyn, isn't it a bit late to wake up and make the discovery that he was leading them into the abyss?

Of course some Labour MPs publicly raised red flags about Corbyn's leadership, and one of two went further and defected.

For the others, if you choose to back somebody you privately think is a dud, the consequences of that fall on you.

The good news for Labour, and this is relatively speaking, is that nothing immediately matters all that much, because they are so far behind that unless something extraordinary happens it will be 10 years before they have a realistic chance of coming to power and forming a government.

There is then a lot of time for rebuilding, a process which will begin with picking an electable leader.

Sir Keir Starmer has indicated that he might throw his hat in the ring. He should be treated as a joke candidate.

Hideously white, a Londoner, with gender-specific dangly bits, and a diehard Remainer to boot who mysteriously was cemented in his role as "Shadow Brexit Secretary," Sir Keir has even less going for him than Emily Thornberry.

As the architect of Labour's Brexit strategy, he is firmly on the people-to-blame naughty step.

No, the leadership pool is likely to comprise women, and one from one of those areas of the UK where Labour needs to rebuild its traditional support and give voters faith once more.

Lisa Nandy already has a television profile, and sort of supports Brexit at a time that Brexit is inevitable. Jess Phillips would bring a frisson of danger to the leadership role. A choice of Rebecca Long-Bailey would demonstrate whether better packaging would sell a form of Corbynism successfully.

And Yvette Cooper can boost huge experience dating back to Gordon Brown's time. So that's two things against her.

Or it could be Somebody Else. Somebody we've more or less never heard of who achieves a surprise victory, as David Cameron did when he virtually won the Tory leadership election on the basis of one off-the-cuff speech.

Labour doesn't have to get it right first time. And arguably which individual becomes leader has less importance than the fundamental question of which direction the party should now take.