Owen Smith is right about his 0.25% chance of becoming the next Labour leader

“I have never met a brighter man,” his wife Liz told The Mirror. The cynic might advise her to get out more

Owen Smith (right) assured Andrew Marr (left) that the he has a 10/10 chance to oust Jeremy Corbyn (BBC)

A fortnight before he ruefully settles down to read his political obituaries, Labour leadership fall guy Owen Smith sends out alarmingly mixed messages about his prospects.

On the one hand, Smithy assures Andrew Marr that the likelihood of him ousting Jeremy Corbyn when the result is revealed on 24 September is “10 out of 10”. This, according to my copy of Advanced Statistics For Dummies, equates to a 100 per cent chance.

On the other hand, he seemed less confident in a newspaper interview. As a 16-year-old schoolboy in Barry, South Wales, he reminisced to the Mirror, there were “1,200 boys, three girls, and I pulled Liz.” (Liz, a teacher, is his wife. Being a married father of three makes him “normal”, he stated with the affable clumsiness that appears to his campaigning signature dish.) “So I must have something going on. That must be leadership.”

Well, it must be something, and hats off to him on that. Yet when we transpose the odds against one of 1200 male students “pulling” one of three females to this election, it gives Smithy a 0.25 per cent chance of success.

You need only glance at that figure to see how ridiculously it exaggerates one candidate’s prospects. Sadly for Smithy, that candidate is himself. The actual chance of him unseating Corbyn isn’t or 1/400, but 0.0000 (recurring) per cent.

Now of course this is not entirely, or even mostly, Owen Smith’s fault. As my colleague Mark Steel hilariously chronicled the other day, Labour’s National Executive Committee has an appetite for banning members from voting on spurious lines. But unless the NEC had disqualified everyone with a vowel in their name, in the hope that just one vowel-less Welsh patriot would swing it for Smithy, Corbyn was unbeatable from the start.

Whoever takes Owen’s role in the 2017 Labour Suicide Run, Corbyn will be unbeatable then. He will probably be unbeatable, should he wish to prolong this intriguing experiment, after the Tories win a massive majority at the next election, so absolutely dominant is ideological purism among this burgeoning Labour membership.

All political parties face the timeless dilemma of how, if at all, to balance their principles against the desire for power. Some, like New Labour, tilt almost totally towards the latter. Others, like the Tea Party in America and Corbyn’s Labour, care only for integrity.

While both are perfectly coherent intellectual positions, only one is electable - though as the calamity now enfolding Labour suggests, a terrible price will eventually be paid for jettisoning the core beliefs which forged the movement in the first place.

But bless Owen Smith for doing his best, such as it is, to split the difference and project himself as the cuddly, flexible, Socialism Lite candidate. “I want to be a force for good in the world. Therefore, you need to achieve power,” he explains. “Nye Bevan, my great hero, said it’s all about achieving and exercising power.”

Apart from the south Wales connection and Owen having aped Bevan’s famous U-turn on unilateral disarmament, it’s a push to find compelling comparisons between Smithy and that glorious titan of a Labour politician. Then again, who can say for sure that Nye wouldn’t have said “Bollocks to founding the NHS, I’m off to work for Pfizer” if only Viagra had been discovered in 1947?

Equally hard to call is whether, as a onetime big pharma lobbyist who argued against the NHS buying generic drugs at a fraction of the cost, Smithy was beautifully positioned to evade the New Labour taint that clung to Angela Eagle this year, and all three of Corbyn’s rivals in 2015.

As for his wittily tweeting a photo of a giant gobstopper in the hope that it could be used to silence Nicola Sturgeon (the little ladies, eh, they will bang on!), that was no smarter than referring to “pulling” Liz at school against such odds. Without having checked my privilege, I wouldn’t care to style the above as instances of casual sexism. But in an alternate universe where he had a quantifiable chance of becoming the Opposition leader, they wouldn’t bode well for the match up with Theresa May.

Owen Smith seems a nice and jolly chap - and at a time when the reincarnated Bevan himself would be rejected by Labour members for reneging on unilateralism, you can’t hold him to account for the imminent crushing defeat. At least he had a crack.

But it is as a paradigm of an era of immeasurable mediocrity in Labour’s parliamentary ranks that he will earn a suitably pygmy footnote in political history. If he will be remembered for anything else, it might be an incident from his early career as a Today programme producer. When asked to get an update on a breaking crime story from the police, he snapped straight into action and called 999.

“I have never met a brighter man,” his wife Liz told the Mirror. The cynic might advise her to get out more, or speculate about the intellects of the 1199 schoolboys who failed to show Smithy’s leadership by pulling her in 1986. I prefer to celebrate what must be a really great marriage, and leave it at that.