This is not about mere differences in political opinion. No-one likes it when their candidate loses, just as others do not when their football team does. But today is about much, much more than that.
My team, and that of thousands of friends and colleagues, has just somehow jumped from the Premier League into the Third Division, with little chance of promotion for at least a decade.
Those of us who backed Liz Kendall for leader would have accepted Yvette Cooper. We would have, perhaps more grudgingly, accepted Andy Burnham, although neither would probably have won in 2020.
But Corbyn? Words fail me.
Today there is a howl of anguish, not just from the party’s centrists but from all those who understand the slow, grinding slog of making a party respectable in order to win power. It takes years to win that respect, but you can lose it in a day.
This is one of those days.
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The harsh truth: this is a disastrous, collective decision made by Labour’s comfort zone, aided and abetted by hard-left dinosaurs leading the big unions, some wide-eyed youth looking for inspiration, a few leftover Trots and some three-pound political tourists.
It is almost a storyline for a low-budget comedy film, where the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate unexpectedly claims the seat of the Prime Minister. It is something which so hits the party’s credibility, it is difficult to see it recovering by 2025, let alone 2020.
Worst of all, many of the party’s rank and file seem blissfully unaware of this fact.
Following the train wreck of this year’s election defeat, today Labour is sucking its collective thumb and rocking catatonically. Like some post-trauma patient, it has retreated into a nice, secure bubble, hermetically sealed off from the views of the public its politicians aspire to serve. YouGov’s recent polling confirmed the vast gulf between the views and attitudes of the Corbynites, and the British public in general. Labour is saying "la la la, I can't hear you".
Imagine: we have just chosen a leader considerably less electable than Michael Foot, after whose election it took Labour seventeen more years to regain power. And before that, the last time it elected a peacenik leader, George Lansbury, it had also been crushed and it was another thirteen years before a Labour leader would again be Prime Minister.
But forget the man himself. Corbyn is not a leader; he has not so much as held junior ministerial or Shadow rank in 32 years in Parliament. It is the fellow-travellers we should worry about, who will take advantage of his "collegiate" leadership to push their own, even-harder-left agendas on his behalf. Purges and de-selections of the politically impure are not an exaggeration: they are a likelihood.
We know, because we have been here before, in the 1980s. Right now, the party has little to look forward to but an extended period as a glorified protest movement. As it was then, when Corbyn first entered Parliament, but worse. And that is, frankly, if it survives at all.
How did we ever get here? Put simply, those who voted were either too young to know the 1980s, or too foolish to realise that they were the desperate nadir and not the zenith of the party.
No, Labour has had no darker hour in my lifetime. Or my parents’.
