***EXCLUSIVE*** The Next Labour Leader is...

…*drum roll please*… apathy! Yes, the absolute winner of this leadership contest – the one who fought the best campaign, and really won people over – is apathy. Because despite this contest having gone on for ages, nothing really happened. In fact – despite the contest for the future of this party – the biggest Labour news story of the summer was around the sniping in Blair’s memoirs. It was about those who represent Labour’s past.

Seriously, the candidates could not have been more lacklustre in their campaigns. Ed Balls seemed to miss the point of what he’s meant to have been doing for the past five months. He’s been carping at the Tories but not really explaining to an understandably sceptical party (given his repugnant behaviour in the last parliament) why they should choose him as the new leader. The Milibands have sniped at each other like testy children in the back of a car on a long journey, while Burnham and Abbott may as well not have bothered. So much for having a big debate. All of the candidates have appeared to have nothing to say. Not so much making their cases to be leader, but rather being too afraid of saying something stupid that might cost them in their campaign. How cowardly. How Nu Labour.

The result of such a dull campaign is that people don’t care. Seriously, no-one out of the self-regarding and incestuous circle of Labour insiders cares about who’s going to be announced as the leader. They’ve failed to engage with the voters despite months of supposed debate about their future. In fact, they still seem to be struggling to understand that they lost the last election, and still think that they need to communicate their message better, rather than changing that message. 5 months of campaigning and debate about the future and they still haven’t reconciled themselves with the immediate past.

The next Labour leader should be worried – very worried. Because this contest has shown that they have a mountain to climb. The public doesn’t care about Labour – they’re just not interested. Meaning the next Labour leader has to get the attention of the people again before they can even consider making that public want to vote them again.