IS Labour risking being cast into the political wilderness until at least 2025, or even longer?  We could be looking at two decades without a red rose being pinned onto the doors of Number 10.

Around Liverpool the Labour candidates all raced across the finishing line on May 7, gaining, as a trophy, Esther McVey’s Wirral West seat. Walton’s Steve Rotheram notched up the highest vote in the3 safest Labour seat in the land.

Around the country, though, thousands of traditionally Labour voters made their choice on black – or should that be blue Thursday - handing a potential long lease to the Conservatives.

Labour’s woes go back even further, though, even before the day Tony Blair handed that coveted key to Downing Street to his chancellor, Gordon Brown.

The party is likely to make the same mistake of choosing a leader it wants, rather than somebody who everyone else wants

Those woes were consolidated even further when Brown, defeated in 2010, handed the top job to Ed Miliband.
Both Brown and Miliband were likeable, able chaps, but they both suffered from the same problem: the British people didn’t like them.

As the window opens this week for formal applications for the Labour leadership,  the question is, will it be third time lucky.  I fear not, and Labour's pains will continue.

The party is likely to make the same mistake of choosing a leader it wants, rather than somebody who everyone else wants: someone who can win over the country.

What is the big rush? Labour will be sitting on the opposition benches for at least five years, so why the race for the job? Wouldn’t Labour be better having an interim leader for a couple of years to identify, once and for all, which path the movement should take.

When Brown became leader, I said "that’s Labour handing in its notice." When Ed Miliband took up the reins I said the same. I’m not convinced brother David would have enjoyed a different result either.

One Andy Burnham headline I read – "I’m a Scouser and an Evertonian" – may well go down in parts of Liverpool, but notg necessarily in the Shires and the Home Counties.

Look at a political map of England and it’s awash with Tory blue, the red bits concentrated in the area Osborne and Cameron want to transform into the Northern Powerhouse.

Labour’s only hope of survival is to reach out to that mass of blue England with conviction that it can do better than them.

Blair charmed his way into power, creating one of Labour’s biggest successes of the 20th century.  Had he not blown it with his approach to the Middle East who knows what might have followed.

To some it seems a leader able, capable, or even willing to juggle the needs of the Red North and the Blue South has yet to be invented.

Will they pick somebody in the near future, only to realise in the Spring of 2020 that they have blown it.  For Labour the best game to play is the waiting game.