Obviously we’re all upset by Labour’s crushing defeat last Thursday. We were all blindsided and never considered the possibility that a party that had lost council elections, European elections and one other general election could lose this general election. There was simply no warning, if you don’t count them other elections, and all of the polling that said he was least popular opposition leader ever.

Now the Labour party must struggle to find a way to continue Corbynism without Corbyn (assuming he ever gets around to leaving). Who else can continue his strategy of making sympathetic noises about the poor, the hungry and the homeless, while actually championing middle-class give-aways, like cheaper train tickets for commuters and free broadband for the nation?

Perhaps best to view this election as a sacrifice. A strategic chess-move, to make your opponent believe they have you on the ropes, lull them into over-confidence and pressing their advantage too hard.

The only answer is that, like good little pawns, the poor must die.

What Corbynism needs now is total Tory ruthlessness. Benefits slashed further, a big dose of Brexit recession, mass unemployment, a repossession bonanza, perhaps a new 50% tax rate for charities. Maybe those things will be enough to give the country the shake it needs to realise that the socialism of the Oxbridge upper-middle classes is the only viable alternative.

Not at the next election, obviously, that’s too soon to rebuild from the scorched Earth of Thursday’s defeat, but definitely the election after that. Or the one after that, latest. Anything sooner than that would be too soon to deviate from the master-plan to something that the public actually want to vote for. You have to give these things time.

And time is firmly on the side of Corbynism. If it actually mattered that life was getting worse for people ranked lowest in the social order then Jeremy Corbyn would have gone when his MPs said they had no confidence in them. If it was genuinely important to have a return to a government that helped people then he would have gone after losing to May’s disastrous 2017 campaign. If the real goal was to stop life being miserable for people then he’d have exited the stage after Labour crashed at the Euro elections, or when the polls resolutely failed to turn in his favour.

But he didn’t, because a true grand-master knows that those pawns must be lost in order to finally win the game. Why cry over the loss of a foot-soldier when delicious check-mate is just 20 moves away?

Let them die, then. Let the first fall on this cold and wet night, in a soaking sleeping-bag on a metropolitan street somewhere. Let them die joyful in the knowledge that they are but the foundation layer in a mountain, atop which a red-flag will one day proudly wave.

Those who form that dreadful mountain may rest peacefully knowing that their suffering was a consequence of Conservatism, but a necessity of Corbynism. That they died to preserve political purity against the harsh beating of electoral compromise.

Perhaps they’ll get their names engraved on a statue to Jeremy fucking Corbyn, the man who saw it all as a game on a black and white board.