Most people rank politicians’ visits to their homes as slightly more tedious than the Jehovah’s witnesses’ in the welcome stakes. We have one of the lowest turnouts in European elections and people under twenty-six hardly vote at all. But, political activists are eternal optimists. They find the whole process endlessly fascinating, and the choosing of a new leader is the highlight of their calendar. Let’s face it political parties are like a sect without the orange robes (the Liberal Democrats wear suits now that their leader has made friends with the other posh boys.

It’s easy to empathise. I don’t like tennis or cricket, but when we lose the ashes or worse still, it rains and Sir Cliff starts singing on Henman Hill, I sit up, take notice and then reach for the remote control. The leaders of our political parties are like this too: They impinge on our collective conscience momentarily when they have sex with Edwina Curry, or “accidentally” claim for unaffordable housing for ducks. The rest of the time we ignore them.

This week I saw the new politics of the centre-left taking shape. It was like playing a small part in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, (Tiny Tim) meeting the ghosts of Labour’s leadership past, present and future in a short space of time at the Compass Conference in London, (Compass are a pressure group for the democratic Centre Left) ,and then at the hustings for black and ethnic majorities in Leicester.

The past was not present at Compass as Harman was not there, having resisted the temptation to stand for Labour leader. Had she done so she would have created a vacancy for Deputy Labour Leader and lost both! Her political obituary might be the short poem by the comedian Arthur Smith:

The present bunches are more interesting. The Miliband of brothers are the very clever sons of a Jewish émigré Ralph Miliband who argued that there is no parliamentary road to Socialism. His Social Democratic offspring are living proof that he was right. Their mother must be less impressed by the needle between them over the war in Iraq. David, nicknamed ‘brains’ by Alistair Campbell is in the lead and seems relaxed and confident but the long campaign favours his brother Ed who to coin Andrew Rawnsley’s favourite phrase, ‘speaks human’, and is closer to the party’s heart and political centre of gravity.

Andy Burnham’s unique selling proposition is that he is a working class northerner and was not a special advisor under New Labour. These are the reasons he will lose. Labour is part of the establishment now and its MPs are just as posh as the coalition.

Poshest of the current bunch is Diane Abbott, another product of Oxbridge who sends her son to Public School but denounced the Blair’s for choosing a very posh selective state school. The multicultural minibus TMP took to Leicester was torn between welcoming a black woman on the ticket and the tokenism that got her there when David Miliband lent her his supporters. She offers no policy and her platform is a mixture of cringing self-indulgence, and wearing her long standing disloyalty to her own party as a badge – which means she has an alibi for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ed Balls sits with the present bunch but belongs to the past as he was Gordon Brown’s representative on earth in a previous life. He is a nice man who is not as mad as his eyes make him look. He won’t win but his wife Yvette Cooper would have stood a chance in this family affair. He gives everyone including himself and me the chance to rehash and old Charlie Whelan joke that ‘two Eds are better than one’.

The future leadership were not in Leicester in or on the platform at either event. They were in the minibus and the audience at both events. Part of Labour’s problem is that it is always waiting for a leader to change society on our behalf without us having to join in. From Martin Luther King Junior to Barack Hussein Obama, history teaches us another lesson.

Compass advocate a politics in which people should be the change they want to see. Three people who embody that message and whose lives illustrate it spoke one after another; Jon Cruddas MP (see Fabius with a Compass) who is the BNP’s worst nightmare made flesh. Jon would not run for the leadership but will one day be Deputy Leader. When he is you will know that Labour finally, ‘gets it’.

He was preceded by TMP founder and new Member of Parliament for Streatham, Chuka Umunna who is, as yet, inexperienced, but has been compared to Obama. On the same platform that afternoon, Oona King, the former MP for Bethnal Green and Bow, she declared that she is challenging Ken Livingstone to be the Labour candidate for Mayor of London.

Whoever the next Labour leader is, those three represent the future, but they can’t do it without us!