Could Steve McCabe be Labour's saviour?

Naturally, the knives will be out for Gordon Brown when the size of the swing from Labour to Conservative becomes apparent.
Anything over 10 per cent will be very bad for Labour, but if the movement in voter sentiment tops 15 per cent Crewe & Nantwich will be regarded as a seminal by-election moment and confirmation that Mr Brown's chances of winning the next General Election are remote without a major policy re-think.
A question remains, though: why did Labour fight such an appallingly bad campaign in Crewe & Nantwich?
My theory, for what it's worth, is that Brown's advisers concluded after Labour's disastrous local election results on May 1 that a by-election, almost anywhere in the country, was a lost cause. The only course of action was to lose, and to lose badly, off the back of a ludicrously out of touch Old Labour campaign in the hope that defeat on such a scale would shock the party into reverting back to the New Labour policies that served it so well between 1997 and 2007.
How else can you explain the decision to put Birmingham MP Steve McCabe in charge and to sanction his laughable attempts to persuade voters not to support Conservative candidate Edward Timpson on the grounds that he hails from a wealthy family, went to a public school and therefore must be a toff and unsuitable to represent a largely working class constituency in North-west England?
In fact, Mr Timpson went to Uppingham which while a fine school is not quite up there in the Toff stakes along with, say, Eton, Harrow and Winchester. My colleague John Duckers, the esteemed Business Editor of The Birmingham Post, went to Uppingham but no one has ever made the mistake of regarding Duckers as anything resembling a Toff.
It is almost as if Labour somehow deliberately wanted to go back 20 years in time and present itself for one final nostalgic time as class warriors and champions of the politics of envy - if only to prove once and for all what a vote-loser such an approach would be when the country is asked to choose its next Government.
Perhaps the thinking is it would be wise to get the Toff issue out of the way now before it drags Labour's General Election campaign into the abyss.
Yes, Gordon Brown will take the initial flak for losing Crewe & Nantwich. But I suspect it will be the hapless Mr McCabe who will find himself singled out by party hacks in press briefings as symptomatic of the Old Labour politics that Mr Brown is so desperate to move away from.
On the other hand, if there is no conspiracy and the Crewe & Nantwich campaign was just an almighty cock-up, then God help the Labour Party.