So, the Labour leadership contest.

What on earth has happened to Labour? They’ve become a party of the spineless. The slimeball Milliband looks like being coroneted all but unopposed, the worst possible outcome in the circumstances. What’s worse is that the main candidates – the two Millibands and Ed Balls – are politically indistinguishable, belonging to the liberal, interventionist, statist school established by Blair, promulgated by Brown and rejected by the electorate two weeks ago. The differences between them are being talked up in the media – David the Ditherer, Ed the Equivocator, Balls the Bully – but their plausible manifestos, cabinets and policy priorities are more or less identical.

Labour needs to recover. It needs a proper, realigning leadership election between a wide range of candidates with competing visions. The Tory relaunch in 2005 was just that – a clash of ideas, between the traditional Conservativism of David Davies, the internationalism and fiscal prudence of Ken Clarke, the social conservativism of Liam Fox and the modernising, “compassionate” neo-conservativism of David Cameron. It’s not that the Labour party lacks these polarities – Alan Johnson represents the traditional left, a slice of the electorate under-represented over the last 30 years, and Hillary Benn, John Cruddas or Yvette Cooper would be modernisers who could pull the party back to the centre. There’s a huge intellectual gap in the opposition vacated by the Lib Dems when they joined the government; Labour could expand to fill that niche quite happily, but they’re choosing not to.

Part of the problem is that Labour has, over the last 13 years, been trained to value unity over intellectual dynamism. The final years of the Blair / Brown “dual government” were horrible; the lesson that Labour learned from them is that internal strife is a fast track to weakness and collapse. Thus Brown’s continued tenure, always keeping a grip on power as those who sought to topple him bottled their chances as quickly as they arose. But it was based on a false premise. Internal conflict can be destructive, but the essence of political renewal – as with any kind of intellectual discipline – lies in constructive debate, in the contest of ideas that are firmly held and passionately defended.

There is a leadership vacuum in Labour and I don’t think that any of the candidates can fill it. I hope that there’s another leadership election within Labour before 2015. Otherwise, the only outcome that seems plausible is that the Tories will find themselves with a much firmer grip on power.