A warning to Corbyn: the centre ground hasn’t disappeared, it is being reshaped | Martin Kettle

Theresa May has a superior grasp of centrism, culturally and politically. That’s why she is winning

It is less than 18 months since Ed Balls was one of the big beasts of British politics. Yet how long ago that era seems when one reads his agonised account of the May 2015 election in his memoir, Speaking Out.As a Financial Times reviewer pungently put it, the Balls generation already “reeks of yesterday.”

Labour lost last year, Balls writes, because it was not sufficiently trusted on the economy, and because Ed Miliband was not credible enough as a potential prime minister. This is what most politicians, as well as most political scientists, election analysts and commentators, myself included, believed at the time and believe now.

Related: Jeremy Corbyn’s critics must decide: unity or terminal decline | Owen Jones

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