When Toynbee talks about "the memory of his predecessor", she doesn't have last year's defeat in mind. She's thinking of the 2017 election, when Corbyn made her look ridiculous. And to paraphrase the film mogul in "The Godfather", a columnist can't afford to look ridiculous. 
This was Toynbee's prediction when the 2017 election was called, as she urged Labour to mount an entirely futile effort to block the election altogether.
We can only imagine how much it must have stuck in her craw to have to write this opening paragraph on the day after the election in June 2017.
Toynbee's whole schtick relies upon this kind of "my heart is with the left, but my head is with the sensible centre" posturing. (This one is from autumn 2016). Labour's electoral breakthrough in 2017 put that grift in jeopardy.
Another brilliant prediction here, from April 2019. If you were expecting some kind of mea culpa for this analysis after December's election result, as Leave-voting constituencies went Tory in droves, you'd be sorely disappointed.
After all that phony "we want the same things, really" rhetoric, Toynbee gets down to brass tacks: she wants Labour to scapegoat the teaching unions for Johnson's disastrous mismanagement of a public-health catastrophe. When in doubt, punch left: the pundit's credo.
