Starmer and Rayner would be a dream team, but Labour also needs a strong shadow chancellor to beat Boris

If Labour wants to present itself as an alternative party of government it will need to deploy all of its very best talents for its shadow cabinet – left, right and centre

Is it too early to dream? Could it be that, just at the very nadir, the Labour Party might just be ready to set about rebuilding itself? Will Britain at last have a functioning opposition party? A democracy worthy of the name?

Seems so. An awful lot could still go very badly wrong, but the signs are that the next leader of the Labour Party will be Keir Starmer, and the next deputy leader will be Angela Rayner. Encouragingly, Starmer has received the nomination of Britain's biggest union, Unison. Starmer-Rayner make for an almost perfectly balanced team – male/female, north/south, centrist/soft left, older/younger, contrasts in background and life experience. You could hardly script it better – the dream team representing the whole party. The contrast with the exclusivist cult of Corbyn could scarcely be starker.

We know who the big loser is. Rebecca Long Bailey’s decision to double down on her loyalty to Jeremy Corbyn looks unwise, if not positively irrational. I can see how she thinks a pledge to “stay true” to the radical programme might go down well, yet I’m not sure why she fell into the trap of awarding Corbyn 10 out of 10 for the worst election result in decades. She did, though.

What was actually more telling was that she didn’t spot the ITV reporter’s game and tell him that the future of the nation is a serious business and not like awarding a man of the match award after an FA cup tie, so don’t be silly. But she just fished out the maximum score, and may have been tempted to go full Spinal Tap and say 11. It was a bit too reminiscent of when, in the referendum campaign, her hero once blundered into giving the European Union a damning and childishly smug seven out of 10.

So much for Magic Granddaughter then. She’ll lose and probably quite decisively, if the membership is coming to its senses. The question then for Starmer and Rayner (the awks flatmate of RLB) will be what to do with her. That really means what kind of part she will play in a radically overhauled shadow cabinet. Because if Labour does intend to present itself as an alternative party of government it will need to deploy all of its very best talents – left, right and centre.

They cannot, for example, make do with a mediocre shadow chancellor at a time of huge economic upheaval, post-Brexit. To be fair, John McDonnell did a better job of it than anyone has a right to expect – but he’s gone. It is not sensible to replace him with his protege Long Bailey, who pledges to continue where he left off.

No, the outstanding candidate to succeed McDonnell is Yvette Cooper, a former chief secretary to the Treasury and Work and Pensions Secretary under Gordon Brown. Not a shadow – the real thing. Her recent Commons performances and experience suggests she’d have little difficulty standing up to Sajid Javid.

She’s recently written about ending the factionalism and restoring Labour’s broad church, and she should be willing to serve. What an asset she’d be. The new Labour leadership team has to have a balanced shadow cabinet – but one where ability and capacity to hit the government hard counts for everything.

There are others too, who have been languishing on the back benches or occupying themselves with select committee work: Hilary Benn, David Lammy, Liz Kendall and Stella Creasy, for example. They should be able to work with surviving members of the Corbyn set up such as Emily Thornberry, Dawn Butler and, yes, Rebecca Long Bailey. RLB could continue to work on the green deal and climate change on the front bench team – an important job. But the days of front benchers being put up for tough parliamentary debates or bruising media interviews just because they agreed with Corbyn have to end.

A team alone is not enough, but a party that shows it is united and has the personnel to at least run the country is a start. Of course they will need credible, deliverable policies. They’ll need to be able to use the new media channels – some not even launched – to get their clear simple messages across. They’ll need organisation, funding, members and activists.

The good news is that none of those things are impossible to achieve. Heavens, they might even find some way of paying some due respect to both Jeremy Corbyn and Tony Blair. We might see them in the same platform. Then you’ll know they’ve healed the wounds. OK, that’s not dreaming, that’s hallucinating. But an opposition party capable of opposing Boris Johnson? Tell me that’s not a fantasy.