But was it the last twitch of a dead faction, or is it going to go on and on ?
Don't get me wrong. I think Starmer is the right man for the job, and I devoutly wish Labour well in opposing the clique currently running(-down) the UK, but I can't see him succeeding while there's still the poison of Momentum circulating in Labour's veins.
There's always going to be an awkward squad on both the Labour left and right, just as the Tories have people like Marc Francois and the ERG and, until Boris Johnson expelled them, people like Ken Clarke, Rory Stewart and Justine Greening.
All parties are coalitions, after all, and you're always going to have factions on the various wings of each party that become more or less powerful. We've seen it before when Michael Foot (a far, far more considerable figure than Jeremy Corbyn, of course) was leader of Labour for a while, and then the centre and right fought back, with Kinnock expelling members of Militant.
I don't see, though, Momentum and Corbyn supporters being anything like the problem Militant were, though. Most Corbyn supporters I've met seem to me nice but misguided rather than a bunch of hard-core Trotskyite militants.
To me it feels as if politics are on hold at the moment, pretty much. Brexit has now happened, having dominated British politics for the last 5 years to the exclusion of much else until this year, when it was pushed aside by Covid-19, which has trashed all the old economic certainties that underpinned austerity in the UK and elsewhere, and I think most of the next four years will be dominated by the government trying to react to the consequences of Covid-19 and the economic devastation it has already caused and will continue to do, while also trying to deal with the climate crisis and the consequences of systemic racism, both of which are now firmly on the agenda, I think, of both the electorate and of business and institutions.
Certainly it seems to me that the circumstances that contributed to the rise of both Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum -- the crash of 2008, followed by austerity -- have now gone, having been overtaken by the consequences of Covid-19, with the result that a Conservative government ... [channels neil kinnock] a Conservative government [/neil kinnock] ... is borrowing furiously to throw piles of money at everything in sight to fix things, while extending state controls on businesses, and which sees extending the government's ability to subsidise particular sectors of the economy ("trying to pick winners and losers," as Margaret Thatcher would have scornfully dismissed it) as an important benefit of leaving the EU.
Meanwhile, the Bank of England, the IMF, the World Bank and everyone else is on board with economic policies that would have been dismissed as outdated Keynesian recipes for disaster only 10 years ago.
So I think that, since the political and economic conditions that led to the rise of left-wing populism throughout Europe and the US have now changed so radically, we're going to see Corbyn and his supporters fade away into the background for the time being, while Keir Starmer concentrates on being decent and competent and professional and all the things Johnson isn't, and keeps his powder dry while purging the antisemitic left from the Party and trying to hold the government to account for their incompetence and mismanagement.
I don't think the issues that will dominate the next election are going to be at all clear for at least another two years, after which time they'll start emerge, maybe, but it really feels to me as if the joint consequences of Brexit and Covid-19, along with the collapse of many assumptions about the US and its relationships with its traditional allies, have changed the political landscape so dramatically that Corbynism and Momentum now seem very much things of the past.
Inevitably, the fights between right and left in Labour will go on, as they do in all political parties, but at the moment it feels to me as if the personalities and policies associated with Jeremy Corbyn and Labour over the last few years will rapidly vanish into the dustbin of history, to be followed soon after by Boris Johnson and the similar group of second-raters (by and large) and loyalists surrounding him, and for the same reasons.
Then there will be a whole new set of fights over policies and personalities, of course, but it will be a new season of the long-running show, with new writers and showrunners.
ETA