New life or terminal decline - Labour's battle to revive its hope

In one sentence, Rob Marris sums up everything that is wrong with the Labour leadership contest.

Breaking his silence on the race to replace Ed Miliband, the only 'new' Labour MP for Wolverhampton or the wider Black Country decided to support Andy Burnham.

Talk is cheap. But voting for the leader of the opposition is virtually bargain basement and costs not even five hours' wages (allegedly) for a Mauritian worker making those 'this is what a feminist looks like' T-shirts worn by Mr Miliband and Harriet Harman, what feels like a lifetime ago.

With the forensic analysis of a solicitor (for this is what Mr Marris was before becoming an MP) he explains Labour's problem in reasoned, logical terms:

"It seems to me that some of them are unlikely ever to inspire the wider electorate.

"None of the candidates has ever had for any length of time what many constituents would call a real job – it's all been in and around the Westminster bubble – and that critique includes Jeremy Corbyn (for whom I am not voting) and Andy Burnham (for whom I am)."

The Wolverhampton South West MP bucked the trend at the election by unseating a Tory, the same one who unseated him five years earlier.

He goes on to endorse shadow health secretary Mr Burnham as the one with the chance to grow the appeal of Labour and praises his willingness to 'risk the ire of the right-wingers'.

And while he says Andy Burnham wants to 'revive hope', Labour's current existential dilemma makes it look pretty hopeless.

In a few weeks a leader will be elected. It is almost certain to be the left-winger Jeremy Corbyn.

If the 1983 election manifesto was the 'longest suicide note in history', this drawn out contest may well be, as others have already punned, the longest suicide vote.

The deep fear of other Labour MPs, many of whom have already spoken out in strong terms against Mr Corbyn, is that he will never win over the 'shy Tories', the ones who did not vote for David Cameron's Conservatives with any great enthusiasm, but did so because they saw his party as the most competent and the safest pair of hands for the economy.

Labour does not have a divine right to be a party of government.

Indeed it does not have a divine right to exist at all, requiring the backing of the electorate to have enough MPs either to govern or to oppose.

The Liberal Democrats have seen how quickly they can go from a party of power to one of near oblivion, of almost shouting through the letterbox of Downing Street when once they would have sat around its cabinet table.

The Corbyn voters, whether dyed in the wool Labour members or those who have signed up for £3, seem to be backing him with a sense of hope and optimism about what they perceive to be a new direction for the party (even if it does look a lot like what went, and failed, before).

Indeed his campaign represents, for his backers, a new lease on life for socialism.

For many other party supporters, however, hearts are not filled with hope but they carry a certain heaviness.

They fear the party of opposition may be in terminal decline.