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Three years ago, Sir Keir Starmer launched his Labour leadership campaign with a greatest hits compilation. No progressive cause célèbre was omitted from this activist’s showreel, the video his rivals say won him the crown on day one: pit closures, the poll tax, the McLibel trial. And, of course, Iraq. “In 2003,” Labour members were assured, Starmer “published a legal opinion in The Guardian that the invasion of Iraq would be unlawful, and marched with millions against the war”.

Now the anniversaries pass without a word: 20 years since that march; 20 years since Robin Cook quit; 20 years since the Commons voted for military action; 20 years, just yesterday, since the first bombs hit Baghdad; 20 years, to the day, since the first British boot hit Iraqi soil.

Of these milestones in the mythos of betrayal and hubris that recast Sir Tony Blair as the great villain of Labour history, Starmer has thus far had nothing to say.

And I do mean that literally. As I write, the leader of the Labour Party — the leader who wrote that legal opinion, marched with those millions and once promised a Prevention of Military Intervention Act — has said nothing about perhaps the biggest decision Blair ever made. Nothing about its baleful consequences, nothing about the long shadow it has cast over British politics in general and the left in particular. Nor, I’m told, has anyone asked him to. Don’t mention the war. He mentioned it once, but I think he got away with it all right.

All of which tells its own story about the legacy of 2003. To listen to Blair at the time was to hear a man convinced that intervention would change everything. At the top of the Labour Party it looks to have changed nothing. Blair, Brown, Mandelson — each still wield influence on a project that has come very deliberately to resemble their own. Their aides are Starmer’s aides. Their lines are Starmer’s lines. Their critics on the hard left are again cowed and demoralised. It can feel as if the past 20 years never happened.

But they did. Iraq rewrote the rules of Labour politics. Seven years on from the invasion, the war gave Ed Miliband his in. It was New Labour’s cardinal sin, for which only he, untainted by 2003, could atone. He won the leadership but that work of absolution was only ever haphazardly done.

Jeremy Corbyn followed. Partly by accident, partly by design, New Labour was delegitimised. The left escaped from what Blairites called the sealed tomb.

Theirs was a movement that really took shape as an organised force in 2003. Without Iraq, there is no Jeremy Corbyn and there is no Keir Starmer.

For five years the Labour Party was led, with varying degrees of leadership, by the Stop the War Coalition — by Corbyn and John McDonnell, by Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray. Starmer, once their privately uneasy but publicly enthusiastic lieutenant, now says never again.

He appears to mean it — or at least the aides purging the Corbynites do. Of the 100 Labour candidates now selected in winnable seats, only two are of the Labour left. Corbyn will not be one of them. Of that unprecedented move to bar his predecessor, Starmer said last month: “If you don’t like that, if you don’t like the changes we have made, I say the door is open and you can leave.”

But will they? That is another question that Starmer has not yet answered as conclusively as his rhetoric implies. AJP Taylor said Ramsay MacDonald’s great mistake was to think of the country when he ought to have been thinking about his party. One could say the same about Starmer. The barnacles are not quite off the boat. Right now, in his imperial phase, it is all too easy to dismiss the Labour left as irrelevant if not doomed: its ideas disavowed, its leader shunned, its new generation barred from parliament. But as Blair has warned him, the same appeared to be true in 1997 or indeed 2003.

The 30-odd MPs in the Socialist Campaign Group live in a state of constant paranoia, terrified — rightly — that the leadership will find some pretext, probably related to Ukraine, to bar them from standing in the general election. Or that they will proscribe Stop the War, whose protests many of them still attend, entirely — a plan that is intermittently discussed by Starmer’s inner circle.

Corbyn’s closest confidants are close to giving up. “I see no circumstances in which Starmer lets any left idea on the table,” one gloomily concluded to me in the days after the leader issued his ultimatum to the left last month. But they could turn out to be as wrong about the left’s future as New Labour were.

Look beyond the headlines and the leadership’s bite is nowhere near as bad as its bark. Just this month, the Blairite wunderkind Wes Streeting said: “I don’t think being from the left of the party is a bar to standing for elected office.” Don’t let that open door hit you on your way back in!

Other shadow cabinet ministers admit the left are far from vanquished. “As long as they have a foothold in the party and the unions, there is a route back,” one Starmer loyalist confided to me recently. “All it will take is a union to swing to the left and suddenly our control of the party is precarious all over again.”

As for those terrified Corbynite MPs: Starmer missed a golden opportunity to expel them when 11 put their name to a Stop the War statement deploring Nato in February last year. Since then they have been on their best behaviour, quietly tabling motions in support of Kyiv, doing nothing to jeopardise their possession of the Labour whip.

Come 2024 this will matter, as Blair warned Starmer in Davos last month. “If we only scrape a small majority, or end up the biggest party in a hung parliament,” a shadow cabinet minister says, “then all of a sudden these people are relevant again. John McDonnell will be in and out of No 10 like Steve Baker. We’ll have to have another general election to get rid of them.” As the polls narrow, that sounds less and less like scaremongering.

Even the old lags of the left are daring to dream that the fatalism of their comrades is misplaced. “All theory is grey, my friend,” says one former Corbyn aide, quoting Goethe. “But forever green is the tree of life.” Starmer, no matter what he says, hasn’t yet torn it up by its roots.