London: The bells are ringing in Portcullis House, the shiny modern parliamentary building across the road from the Gothic Victoriana of Westminster.
Labour Catherine West MP rises from her chair and walks briskly towards the tunnel to the Commons, for a couple of votes on welfare reform and education.
It is late   February and not proving a great week for Labour, and its (still) surprise leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the bearded leftie who snatched the party from its centrist leaders and to their annoyance is refusing to give it back.
That morning The Times' parliamentary sketch writer, entertained by a spat between Bullingdon??? buddies David Cameron and Boris Johnson, spared a paragraph for a slap at Corbyn: "he keeps sinking to the occasion. His contribution ... was met with bored expressions from Tory MPs and sullen ones from Labourites." 
The next day Cameron will tell Corbyn: "I think I know what my mother would say. I think she'd look across the dispatch box and she'd say: 'put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem.'"
The political year has begun as 2015 ended: the establishment united in condescending contempt for Corbyn, agreed that he cannot win an election, cannot even count on the support of his own parliamentary colleagues.
The government is behaving as if it almost has no opposition. The narrative of the European Union referendum is one of a civil war among Tories, and the upcoming budget is tipped to include a &pound;1 billion ($1.9 billion) welfare cut to make room for middle-class tax relief.
But West doesn't look worried. She doesn't look harried, bored or sullen. There is a quiet energy about her. She is one of the Labour MPs you don't read about: the ones who have backed Corbyn all along, as a genuine chance to change politics in Britain.
Last time I spoke to West it was in   June last year when she had just made her maiden speech to Parliament, having retaken the inner-north London seat of Hornsey and Wood Green from the Liberal Democrats, as around her Labour sunk to a devastating general election loss.
An expat Australian who joined British Labour age 30, rising through local government, West said then she hadn't yet decided who she supported in the upcoming leadership fight.
Now she is shadow foreign minister, having decided to back Corbyn.
"I came back from summer holidays and looked at all the candidates, and I just felt that Jeremy's campaign had the most sense of vigour about it," she says.
She noted how many young people were associated with his campaign. It wasn't a vote-counting exercise, so much as a sense that this was where Labour should be, their concerns were Labour's true concerns: the incredible cost of housing, the unfair cost of education, the rising cost of healthcare.
"People just feel as though the older generation has let them down ... they feel traditional politics has let them down," West says.
She sees in Corbyn an old-fashioned, "authentic" (she uses that word a lot to describe him) leader.
"People to some degree are rejecting the centre ... because so much funding has gone from the basics and a lot of the old certainties just aren't there any more," West says.
She sees an opportunity for the party to win support, not just from the poor and underprivileged, but from the middle classes: "Parents can see their children will not be able to live near them, or look after them in their older age - because they just can't afford it."
But, of course, West isn't blind. It would take an absurd effort of self-delusion to believe Labour is united behind its leader and settling onto a steady path to victory in 2020.
She sees two big challenges ahead. The first is finding consensus on some pretty divisive issues, such as Britain's nuclear arsenal. And the other, "to settle ourselves down a bit more so there aren't people internally who are talking out of turn".
They're doing a big more than talking out of turn. This week Corbyn used the first Labour parliamentary party meeting of the year to appeal for unity and an end to sniping. His spokesman told the press afterwards that MPs had experienced a "sea change in attitudes".
Within hours the sniping resumed.
"There is nothing more important than ditching Jeremy Corbyn", one MP, newly elected last year, told the BBC.
An ex-minister told the same reporter that "if Jeremy Corbyn leads us in to the 2020 election, it's all over for the party".
Said another: "I find a new reason to despair every day."
Political writers are speculating on who could replace Corbyn: his Mao's red book-waving shadow chancellor John McDonnell, perhaps, or his deputy Tom Watson (who said in Parliament a week ago "sadly I am not in the strongest of positions to lecture [a government] minister on handling splits in his own party").
But Corbyn's support among Labour members, as opposed to MPs, is stronger than ever. A YouGov poll of party members found he would win more handily in a leadership vote than he did the first time, with 62 per cent of the votes, his nearest rival (Hilary Benn) on just 15 per cent.
The only way a leadership spill could hold is if it was engineered so Corbyn was not on the ticket: an act of such transparent skullduggery that it would taint the new leader from day one.
So there is reason, not just faith, in West's confidence. She believes they have the time to make this work.
"We need to win a few elections," is the first step - and there are elections to be won. In   December Labour won the Oldham byelection when some were predicting a UKIP steal. Labour's candidate for London mayor is ahead of his Conservative rival in the battle to replace Boris Johnson. Also in   May are elections in Wales and Scotland that, while not promising a miracle, may at least show a basement to Labour's support that it can build on.
And, not to forget that the Conservatives are expected to change leader sometime in the next few years, quite possibly in the wreckage of a horrendous Brexit debate.
"We need to build up where we're at, what our core objectives are, and get ourselves back with a bit more confidence about what we believe in, what we stand for," West says.
"I think the important thing is to get ourselves through these elections and then to regroup."
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