“HASTA la vista, baby” said Boris Johnson, though, unlike, the Terminator he won’t be back. He took the fall for No.10’s party culture but is Keir Starmer taking responsibility for his party’s culture of racism and sexism, as revealed in the Forde Report?

If you want to know why Labour has never had a woman or non-white leader, this long-delayed report into “deplorable factionalism” in the party explains a lot.

Martin Forde QC says there was “overt and underlying racism and sexism” before 2019. Senior Labour staff displayed “deplorable factional, insensitive and at times discriminatory attitudes”. Black and women MPs were “not always treated in the same way as their white/male counterparts”. Ethnic minority MPs, councillors and CLP members were talked of with “particular disdain” by the “near exclusively white” senior Labour management .

In other words, the neanderthal attitudes exposed in the Met Police were alive and well in the party of anti-racism and gender equality. Why is no-one talking about this? These astonishing revelations about the state of the opposition in the recent past seem to have passed with scarcely a murmur.

Black Labour politicians like Diane Abbott were the subject of “expressions of visceral disgust drawing (consciously or otherwise) on racist tropes [that] bear little resemblance to the criticisms of white male MPs elsewhere in the messages”. Imagine the outrage if that had been Tory party managers talking about Kemi Badenoch.

Forde concludes that antisemitism became the plaything of factions. Left and right were guilty of “weaponising the issue and failing to recognise the seriousness of antisemitism”. Jeremy Corbyn is not accused directly of hating Jewish people, though the report suggests claims he turned a blind eye to it. He declined to give evidence to Forde, which is unfortunate because the former Labour leader emerges, if not exonerated, then certainly the hapless target of dirty tricks.

Forde reports that a clique in Labour HQ diverted £135,000 in a “covert” campaign to prevent Labour candidates doing well in “potentially winnable Tory seats”. Yes, senior party staff were actively conspiring to make Labour lose, using party members’ subs to do it.

Momentum say Forde is a “damning indictment of the Labour right’s attempt to destroy from within the Corbyn leadership”. The current leadership says everything has changed under Starmer and that the report just shows how Corbyn was a disaster. But Sir Keir was one of his top lieutenants. Did he try to stop it?

Labour activists say, somewhat optimistically, that had it not been for this factionalism, Johnson might never have got to No 10 to hold his parties. Mind you, after what we have learned, perhaps the country escaped a bullet. Labour’s reckless factionalism would have been translated into the very government of the UK.