David Miliband (the New Labour stalwart who ran away from British politics when his brother beat him to the Labour Party leadership in 2010) is the latest New Labour figure to throw the "unelectable" trope at Jeremy Corbyn.
Attacking and diminishing the leader of their own party was bad enough when the divisive Labour leadership coup was going on. But now that it's clear that the coup plot, the vote-rigging and the purges were almost certainly in vain, and that Corbyn is going to win again you have to wonder what the motivation is to keep on like this.
The first suspicion is that it is just petulant foot-stamping. They right-wing of the party didn't get their own way, so now they've venting their toddler-like fury without even thinking about the consequences of what they're saying.
By continuing to repeatedly badmouth Jeremy Corbyn they're making it seem that they're unaware of the concept of a "self-fulfilling prophecy".
Of course Corbyn is going to have a tough time with the entire mainstream press demonstrably fighting a propaganda war against him. Of course he's going to have a tough time trying to reunite the party and undo some of the extraordinary damage this inept and shockingly timed coup-plot inflicted; and of course it's going to take a lot of hard work to undo the shockingly widespread public misconceptions that Tory austerity is actually good for the economy, and that Theresa May is a competent politician.
But that job is going to be made all the more difficult if a bunch of bitter sore-losers in his own party insist on repeatedly carping from the sidelines.
The other option of course is that these people know perfectly well what a "self-fulfilling prophecy" is, and that they're deliberately trying to create one. After all, their idol Tony Blair has openly stated that he'd rather see the Tories win the next General Election than a Labour Party that has returned to its democratic socialist roots. It's perfectly possible that Tony Blair's acolytes are simply doing his bidding with their persistent efforts to sabotage the Labour Party.
The problem with the strategy of trying to deliberately create the self-fulfilling prophecy that Jeremy Corbyn is "unelectable" is that if the prophecy comes true, there are an awful lot of people in the Labour Party who will blame the saboteurs, not the leadership.
Do the Labour Party saboteurs really think that the party membership are going to blame the guy who tried to do his best despite the challenging circumstances, or the New Labour clique who have been seen to do everything in their power to undermine the Labour Party and its democratically elected leader from day one?
It's certain that should Corbyn lose the mainstream press will try to paint the narrative that centre-left politics is dead and buried, and that we are stuck with various shades of Tory crony capitalism for ever, but we already know that the mainstream press no longer have a total ideological staranglehold on the public, otherwise Corbyn would have been annihilated in the 2015 leadership election and one of the New Labour candidates would no doubt be currently trying to "oppose" the post-Brexit Tory shambles by imitating Try policies and Tory political rhetoric as closely as possible.
Instead the New Labour lot have just lost the ideological war for the future of the Labour Party for a second time. Their choice now is simple. Unite behind the leader and actually try to win, or carry on trying to undermine the party and put themselves up as the people to blame when their self-fulfilling prophecies come true.
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