Labour is not so much playing on the right wing as aggressively slide-tackling anyone who dares to linger on the left.

"If Labour Front Benchers were a football team," Chris Grayling chuckled from the dispatch box a decade ago, "they would have... lots of people on the left wing, nobody willing to play on the right and endless own goals." Back in 2016, Labour looked less like a disciplined football side than a circular firing squad wearing oversized red rosettes.

Nearly a decade later, the joke has acquired an unexpected sequel. As Labour wrestles with its post-Starmer future, the leadership contest has become a battle over whether the party should continue its march towards the political centre or rediscover its left flank. Andy Burnham, widely tipped as the overwhelming favourite should a vacancy arise, has found himself at the centre of that argument, particularly over his support for the Government’s hard-line Immigration and Asylum Bill and the bitter rows it has provoked inside Labour.

Grayling’s gag was that Labour had nobody willing to play on the right. The irony now is that one of the party’s defining internal arguments is whether it has gone too far in precisely that direction. The own goals may be fewer than they were in 2016, but the rows over where the team ought to be playing have hardly disappeared.

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