The Tories have been wheeling Thatcher, Archer and Pinochet onto stage all week. A loony, a liar and a murderer. With opponents like that Labour don't need to be even competent to carry on winning, they just need to carry on not being Tory.
Obviously the Tories have no hope of winning anything in the next general election and are determined to get the agony with over before the one after. Or maybe, if they are serious about Portillo (a man I wouldn't trust in charge of a trout farm) they like publicly humiliating themselves with political dinosaurs in compromising positions and will carry on for years. I know that many, many Labour MPs are hoping for Portillo to become the next Tory leader (they used to prefer Redwood but he is too clever & can pass for a decent human being). Maybe the Mandleson Machine can make it so - after all they seem to have somehow got Archer selected as the London candidate, which is a result for Labour.
Ghoulish as it sounds, there are no doubt Tory prospective Parliamentary candidates all over England who are secretly praying for the death - or at any rate utterly disabling illness - of Margaret Thatcher. Every time she opens her mouth a few more votes go out the window. I can't imagine that anyone except a few residual crypto-fascists can any longer seriously defend Thatcher's overblown reputation. All this "greatest Prime Minister this century" crap is long gone - in the judgement of history she'll be competing for 8th place with the likes of Baldwin & Chamberlain, a whisker below Wilson.