Slowly but surely, Corbyn has taken control of Labor. So, what next?

The parliamentary party now realizes any attempt to stop the leftward drift will require time and patience 

As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted... "The opening line of Ken Livingstone's victory speech after the 2000 London mayoral election was equal parts humor and vanity. He was entitled to a moment of bombast, having out-manoeuvred the New Labor machine at the peak of its powers. The throne he had seized was enough like the one he had occupied as leader of the Greater London Council, which Margaret Thatcher had abolished in 1986, to make the joke work.

The second of Livingstone's political lives ended with defeat by Boris Johnson, but to the astonishment of many Labor MPs he is enjoying a third incarnation under Jeremy Corbyn as emeritus professor of winding up the right wing of the party. He has an indistinct formal role reviewing policy, which understates his value to the operation. Two of Corbyn's most senior advisers, chief of staff Simon Fletcher and head of policy and rebuttal Neale Coleman, are loyal veterans of Livingstone's City Hall team.

Experience of executive power in the capital has nurtured a pragmatic streak in the Kennites. Even back in the GLC days, Livingstone was a less fiery shade of red than his deputy, John McDonnell. The two fell out very publicly over budget cuts, and relations have never entirely healed. "He is a Kinnock," McDonnell said of his former friend, when no fouler word for betrayal sprang to mind.

That is not a description recognized by MPs who are trying, and mostly failing, to resist the new regime's sharp leftward turn. Many see Livingstone as a malevolent provocateur who uses media profile to foment rage in the parliamentary party. The plan, it is alleged, is to either drive moderates to quit in disgust or incite them to public criticism of the leadership. A certain volume of dissent is necessary to sustain the belief that a rebellious parliamentary party is the obstacle to success, which is a kind of vaccination for many Corbynites against evidence that the leader himself might be flawed.

If the moderates are over-thinking the actions of their tormentors, it is compensation for the complacent decade of not taking the left seriously. Under New Labor, the perpetually rebellious fringe was more indulged than persecuted. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were confident enough of their victory over the old dogmas that the remaining believers were treated with a kind of tolerant disdain; like ageing specimens of a ferocious but endangered species, harmless in the care of professional handlers and unlikely to breed in the wild.

Whatever else Corbyn's surprise ascent last year represents, it demonstrates the value of patience. It takes a particular temperament to plug away in apparently futile opposition, making pretty much the same speech to the same fringe meeting for 30 years, letting no belief be washed away by shifting political and economic tides, but instead sifting events for bits of evidence to support the unwavering faith. Not everyone who is cast on the wrong side of history sticks around, confident that history will swing by again in the opposite direction. Yes, Corbyn has been lucky, but fortune only furnished the battle. He gets the credit for winning.

And he is still winning. The tendency in Westminster is to measure success by the restless pulse of the news cycle and the temperature of public opinion. In those terms, Corbyn is not doing so well. It took the best part of a fortnight to conduct a shadow cabinet reshuffle from which the casual observer will have gleaned that Labor is in chaos, divided over nuclear defences with a new bias towards the view that Britain shouldn't have any. By conventional measures this is bad, but the tradition from which Corbyn hails does not respect those conventions.

To sneer at 14 days of reshuffle-related mess is an error based on the Westminster canard that a week is a long time. Corbyn and friends come from a place where 14 years is a pause for breath; where 30 years of barren rhetoric can whizz by without frustration. Set that as the tempo of achievement and the appointment of an anti-Trident shadow defence secretary is a monumental triumph. Every day in the leader's chair is more triumphant still if it stops the Labor party returning to what it was.

Slowly the perspective of Labor MPs is shifting. They grasp that Corbyn has won and that much of his victory is irreversible. Even if he were ousted, the result of last summer's culture war between a bloodless remnant of New Labor and clamor for something vastly different cannot be overturned. "We can't keep throwing buckets of icy water over our members and telling them to snap out of it," says one backbencher. 

Many sceptics are moving on from the question of how the whole Corbyn thing can be stopped to focus on what might come afterwards, although even that passive acquiescence is despised as collaboration by the hardcore resistance. Either way, a majority in 2020 has been largely written off. The eggs are broken and Labor will end up having to serve some scrambled version of radical left politics, regardless of who leads or what the electorate wants.

Talk of a coup after local elections this May has subsided. MPs already know their disloyalty will be held up as the cause of any disappointing results, while modest gains can be cast as heroic strides forwards into merciless media headwinds. When the clock ticks to Corbyn Mean TIme, even the tiniest step counts as progress on the long march to a better politics.

Labor is certainly on a long-haul flight to somewhere and MPs are still suffering from jet leg. They are accustomed politics that meets the deadline of wooing voters in time for an election. That would require dealing with the well-documented reasons why the party lost last May: lack of trust on the economy, immigration, benefits, leadership. But that task hasn't even begun in earnest. Instead, all sides are consumed by a slow-motion, introspective war of attrition for control of the agenda. It is the kind of combat that Corbyn and his allies know well, while their fidgety opponents are still adjusting to the pace. Those impatient for effective opposition need to reset their watches. Labor isn't just out of synch with the country. It has landed in a different political time zone.