COMMUNICATION Workers Union (CWU) general secretary Dave Ward set the cat among the pigeons recently when he announced that the CWU was backing Jeremy Corbyn as an antidote to the “virus within the Labour Party.”

Ward said: “We reject the notion that Labour needs to move to the centre ground of British politics. The centre ground has moved significantly to the right in recent years.”

He insisted that “the grip of the Blairites” on Labour must be “loosened once and for all.”

New Labourites hastened to inform news outlets of their acute discomfort over a previously unknown level of personal abuse that was causing countless numbers of party members to call for smelling salts or succumb to the vapours.

How badly Ward had misjudged the situation by speaking uncharitably of comrades with different political attitudes, they lamented.

It fell to Alan Johnson — not only a former New Labour minister but also a previous leader of one of the unions that merged to create the CWU — to lecture Ward on doing things right.

First lesson, play the ball not the man: so Johnson demeaned Ward by insisting that, in the quarter-century that he has known the CWU leader, “he has never been a political activist.”

Perhaps it all depends on what you mean by political.

Ward might well believe that being an active part of a broad coalition to spike Peter Mandelson’s scheme to privatise Royal Mail was a wee bit political.

For Johnson’s information, this was when he was a New Labour minister. His government undermined Royal Mail by encouraging private competitors to cherry-pick postal contracts, resulting in management pressure on union members’ full-time jobs, pensions and conditions.

Yet he claims that trade union members “benefited so much under the last Labour government.”

Johnson also chanced his arm by resurrecting Keir Hardie to deploy him against the “hard left” intolerance of Corbyn and his supporters, casting the Labour Party founder member as “eschewing class warfare” and “inspired by Methodism more than Marxism.”

This would be the same Hardie who spoke of the need for “land, capital and the state itself (to) be owned by the useful classes” and urged “the overthrow of a system which has filled the world with want and woe.”

The final year of his life was punctuated by a series of anti-war meetings to bring the imperialist slaughter of the first world war to an end.

If reborn, would he have stood alongside Johnson, Mandelson, Blair and co in justifying slavish support for the US invasion of Iraq?

Johnson’s failure to notice what Keir Hardie actually stood for politically is matched by his inability to notice that, long before Ward’s “virus” comment, personalised abuse against Corbyn was already rife.

The former home secretary might also reconsider his reference to ending Labour’s “madness” in his advice to back Yvette Cooper for the leadership.

Possibly the worst example of ad hominem slurs was John Mann’s attempt to smear Corbyn as somehow responsible for inaction over paedophilia in Islington.

However, he is not alone. Tony Blair said that anyone who said “my heart’s with Jeremy” should have a transplant.

John McTernan, whose name is always bracketed with “former adviser to Tony Blair” to save people wondering who he is, took a special prize for novel approaches to democracy when he expressed utter contempt for the views of party members: “Who cares about the grassroots? The leader is the one who determines the saleability of the Labour Party.

Nobody is voting for Tumbleweed CLP,” he sneered.

McTernan denounced those who had nominated Corbyn despite not intending to vote for him as “morons.”

He said that Corbyn should not be allowed to be in charge of the party for “two minutes” and, if elected, something must be “done swiftly and quickly to restore the party to its senses.”

McTernan advised Australia’s Labour Party during the 2013 elections that it lost and was Jim Murphy’s right-hand man when Labour was all but wiped out in Scotland in May, but chronic failure has never persuaded New Labourites that they could be wrong.

They may lose in elections, but they have a direct line to voters’ consciousness to state, without fear of contradiction, that Corbyn’s victory will result in long-term electoral success for the Tories.

Shadow chancellor Chris Leslie warns that, if Corbyn wins, “you have a decade or more of Tory rule.”

Both Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall accuse Corbyn of wanting to “turn the clock back” because he is in line with public opinion over returning the railways and Royal Mail to public ownership.

“This shows there is nothing new about Jeremy Corbyn’s politics. It is just Bennism reheated, a throwback to the past, not the change we need for our party or our country,” Kendall pontificated.

She believes that a Corbyn victory would result in an even bigger election defeat than Labour suffered in May.

Andy Burnham sees Labour “at a fork in the road,” believing that, “if we take the wrong turn, there’s a real risk that the party could split.”

He goes on: “Becoming a party of protest riven by factions is of no use to (people hit by the Tories) whatsoever. If that is what happens, they will conclude Labour has become irrelevant and they would be right.”

Such comments sum up the Westminster bubble view of what is taking place outside it.

They are backed by a small number of rich donors who, unlike trade unions, stipulate that their donations carry a policy-veto warning.

Five of them told the Telegraph that a Corbyn victory would be “disastrous” and could keep Labour out of office for decades.

Industrialist Assem Allam, who owns Hull City FC and is constant conflict with fans over his plan to force through a name change, says: “I never back a dead horse,” while insurance executive Richard Brindle branded Corbyn’s popular policies “electoral suicide” that would leave Labour in opposition for 20 years.

Those who have ignored Labour grassroots voters and potential supporters in favour of constructing their own straw men to explain a steady reduction in turnout and vote share cannot understand that Corbyn is offering something radically different from the old jaded Establishment orthodoxy.

They retain their know-it-all superiority about what is possible, electable and desirable without realising that major changes in public opinion have been taking place throughout Europe.

If Labour had maintained its electoral support at 1997 levels rather than watching its votes in all contests slide inexorably, there might be justification for such arrogance, but it didn’t so there isn’t.

Old empty “responsible” formulations don’t work any more. Voters don’t want to give the benefit of the doubt, because they are no longer in doubt.

As travel union TSSA general secretary Manuel Cortes puts it: “Jeremy is clearly articulating why we must end the austerity quagmire and that Labour’s economic policies must move on from failed neoliberalism.”

Labour’s record in office under the New Labour brand embraced overseas wars, subservience to the City, privatisation, worship of wealth, the MP expenses scandal, putting policies and gongs out to the highest bidder, squeezing the public sector and putting the boot into claimants.

Ward cannot be faulted for describing this catalogue of disaster as a political virus.

Corbyn as an individual is not the antidote to this virus, but the mass movement growing around his example — to a significant extent composed of previously unorganised young people — has the capacity to be so.

No matter what the political elite and the commentariat in the right-wing media may say, it really is time for political change.