Jeremy Corbyn is to be rebooted. You know a party is in trouble when they publicly talk about a relaunch. If you’re talking about it, it isn’t working.
However, it is reassuring that the Labour spinners have recognised the need to do something: the party might brief that they are on an “election footing” but it has the profile of an election to a district council.
The Red Box tracker of media mentions, compiled by Tom Wills in the Times data team, shows that Corbyn ends the year getting fewer name checks in national newspapers than David Cameron, who ceased to be prime minister five months ago but can still make more headlines by taking up shooting than the Labour leader can with a major policy speech.
On November 23, the day of the autumn statement, the leader of Her Majesty’s official opposition was named in seven articles. That’s one more than Tim Farron, leader of the Liberal Democrats, a party which had eight MPs at the time.
Corbyn has also spent most of the past couple of months with a lower profile than Nigel Farage, who has been boosted by his friendship with Donald Trump and the tendency of his leadership successors to resign.
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Of course the “media mentions” cover the good and bad, and Corbynistas might prefer no coverage of the vitriol their man has sometimes faced. And they will say something mad about how Twitter will decide the next election.
But in the real world, where real people aren’t really interested in politics, you need to at least make voters aware of your existence.
In fact Corbyn ends the year getting half the exposure he did at the start, when his never-ending revenge reshuffle was grinding on. Since his re-election as Labour leader in September it has been a quiet drift into irrelevance.
This is what cheers Downing Street at the moment. Despite churning out far less drivel than Team Cameron, Theresa May’s profile seems much in line with her predecessor’s, even if they are all stories which say: “Theresa May last night said Brexit means Brexit and nothing else.”
The Tories are riding high in the polls, 18 points ahead of their rivals. When a gloom-monger warns that May could lose the next election, the obvious questions is: “Lose to who?”
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But this is the quiet before the storm. The reason the Tory operation is working is because they have said and done almost nothing. Once Article 50 is triggered and May is forced to say where she stands on the single market, the customs union, paying more to Brussels and letting migrants stay, the Conservative coalition of the contented will dissolve.
Just because Labour seems ill-equipped to exploit it, or at least ill-equipped to get anyone to report on their efforts to exploit it, doesn’t mean the problems won’t come.
Labour under Ed Miliband struggled for attention when Tory-Lib Dem coalition in-fighting dominated. Corbyn will suffer the same fate when the Brexit battles begin.
If 2016 was the year that unpredictable madness happened, 2017 starts as the year when we know the madness is coming. Corbyn is going nowhere, and no one is watching.