Jeremy Corbyn could hand Labour victory in this general election – if he steps down now

Having moved Labour policy leftwards, Corbyn himself is not an election winner. The greatest gift he can now give his party is to make way for someone else who can throw Boris Johnson off balance

Early in 1983, it looked as if the Australian Labor Party was about to be defeated for the third time in a row. The party’s leader, Bill Hayden, once its youngest MP, was a decent left-winger who had the support of the rank and file membership.

He faced the flamboyant Oxford-educated Malcolm Fraser, a self-publicist, who had the Australian press eating out of the palm of his hand. Hayden’s Labor Party lost a key by-election in December. It was then that the party and Hayden himself decided to act.

On the very day Malcolm Fraser called the election Hayden stood down voluntarily in favour of Bob Hawke, who went on to defeat Fraser and install Labor in power for 13 years. Hayden became foreign minister and later governor general, but his greatest and least selfish act was to realise that he was not the decisive election winner that Labor needed at the time.

The moral for the British Labour Party is obvious. Jeremy Corbyn is too easily scorned by the Blairite generation he displaced. He has none of the attributes the centralised mono-voice London media want to see in a Labour leader.

Harold Wilson famously said he had to “wade through shit” to keep Labour together on Europe. Corbyn has sat on the Brexit fence to the point where, as Aneurin Bevan put it in a different context, “the iron has entered his soul”.

There are several positives for Corbyn in an election campaign, or at least they don’t look as bad by comparison with the Tories – but are they enough to get him through the door?

Firstly, Corbyn has got the issue of antisemitism disastrously wrong – but the rank Islamaphobia in the Conservative Party and Boris Johnson’s description of African children as “piccaninnies” or Muslim women as “letter-boxes” is horrid and insulting to Britain’s BAME community.

Secondly, he has moved the dial of British politics. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies has noted, Johnson’s spending pledges are the same as Labour’s economic policy in the 2017 general election. Sincere or not Johnson is spraying around promises on workers’ rights and environmental protection which Corbyn highlighted.

Thirdly, it is unlikely that any future government will repeat the errors of Blair’s intervention in Iraq or Cameron’s support for regime change in Libya and Syria, which produced the tsunami of refugee and migrants in recent years. Corbyn opposed those wars, and has been praised in his consistency.

But having moved policy leftwards, he is not an election winner. Clement Attlee foolishly fought the 1955 election in his early 70s. A younger Labour leader more in tune with a Britain that wanted to forget about the 1940s might have won, but Attlee was too vain to let go.

Other Labour leaders like Hugh Gaitskell or John Smith were felled by sudden illness. But this allowed a much more natural election winner to emerge in the shape of Harold Wilson in the 1960s and Tony Blair 30 years later.

Corbyn should realise that the greatest gift he can give is to make way for someone else who can throw Johnson off balance. A fresh face and voice from an Emily Thornberry or Hilary Benn would galvanise Labour and allow progressive Britain to escape from the Brexit trap and the aftermath of austerity.

It is Corbyn’s call. He can make a decision that would usher his party to power and defeat the Trump-esque Brexit neo-liberal project. Will he?

Denis MacShane was a Labour MP for 18 years and worked for eight years at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as parliamentary private secretary and minister