Corbyn can no longer ignore the spectre of his imminent demise

Labour's civil war is bound to have a bloody end

Jeremy Corbyn has linked the planned Heathrow development with the scandal over polluting diesel cars (Rex)

When, in “Do-Re-Mi”, Julie Andrews’ Maria told the Von Trapp kids to start at the very beginning because it’s a very good place to start, she let herself down badly there in regard to Jeremy Corbyn. With the tragicomic celebration of rampaging fiasco which (through very little fault of his own) his leadership represents, we need to start at the end and work backwards. Or rather, he does.

Reverse chronology is a familiar literary conceit (Harold Pinter’s Betrayal; Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow), but never has a new political leader accepted the imminence of his ending, and acted accordingly. While asking Corbyn to pioneer this concept may be extending his embrace of a “new politics” into a suicidal death-hug too far, Monday’s raucous Parliamentary Labour Party meeting should have left him in no doubt. Labour is heading unavoidably towards a nuclear civil war between its parliamentary Roundheads and its membership Cavaliers, who are adopting a form of Mutually Assured Destruction under which no consequence, however cataclysmic, will constitute a deterrent.

And that PLP meeting was an aperitif before the banquet to follow. What sparked the merriment was shadow Chancellor John McDonnell’s rejection of the policy he championed as long as a fortnight ago. Then, posing as a fiscal Roundhead in his conference speech, he pledged to vote today in support of the Tory commitment to produce a budget surplus “in normal times”. On Monday, he donned his Cavalier’s hat and reversed his position.

God knows why he supported George Osborne’s tactical chicanery in the first place. A legally binding commitment predicated on something as wildly unpredictable as economic performance – “in normal times” forsooth; when are times ever normal? – demanded ridicule rather than qualified backing. Supporting it undermined the rationale behind this leadership. From Liz Kendall’s shadow Chancellor, it would have made sense. From Corbyn’s, it was transparent posturing.

Foolish as that was, the manner of his U-turn implied that Denis Healey in his present state would be a more effective shadow Chancellor. For McDonnell to abandon that policy without any discussion with colleagues highlighted the isolation of a cabal which feels it can only carry the Shadow Cabinet and PLP by bouncing them into a fait accompli.

So it was that Ben Bradshaw, not one of nature’s firebrands, was heard yelling “it’s a total fucking shambles”. What followed confirmed it. A month into the regime, the leadership still has no media strategy. The spirits of those of us who admire Corbyn and wish him well sank further yesterday when John Humphrys announced that McDonnell had declined to appear on the Today programme.

The short straw fell to Diane Abbott, who did her best to sound jolly. But her refusal even to try to explain the volte-face (wait until tomorrow, said this Little Orphan Annie, when the sun’ll come out and all will be clarified in the Commons) did nothing to diminish the sense of all-consuming chaos.

This surface cack-handedness is light relief compared with the destructive tensions swirling beneath. If nine-tenths of Corbyn’s MPs are Roundheads who believe fiscal puritanism is the only credible position to take, some 99 per cent of the party’s new supporters, who gave Corbyn his landslide, are anti-austerity Cavaliers.

This is not a reconcilable difference of opinion within a broad church. This is a vicious battle between implacable enemies that can bring only hideous bloodshed. How Corbyn’s leadership ends is less clear. When the MPs activate a leadership challenge, the members will give him another landslide. Since he cannot be removed under the current system, he must continue pitting membership against PLP because he has no other way to survive. But eventually, perhaps when he cannot form an even vaguely credible Shadow Cabinet, either he will quit or a vast phalanx of MPs will give up the Labour whip.

Since it must end soon, Corbyn’s only logical option is to allow his imminent political death to concentrate his mind on what to do with the little time available. He may already appreciate that his most realistic ambition, biblically, is to be not the Joshua who takes Labour into the promised land but the Moses who leads the party out of bondage to the Blairite/Brownite ideology, into a spell in the wilderness that will not – with David Cameron elegantly feigning to colonise the centre ground – be brief.

The only way to prepare for a Joshua is to recreate Labour as a populist movement dedicated, in deed as well as word, to the vulnerable. His priority must be to increase and harness the influx of young members, inviting them to work under a centralised system as volunteers. They could, for one example, visit the disabled abandoned by ravaged local authority budgets, to offer company and help with menial tasks they cannot manage. These young people burn with rage at social injustice. They do not need motivating. They need organising.

If Corbyn could commandeer the ‘big society’ and make it real – not just to highlight the gulf between grandiose Conservative words about compassion and the effects of their policies, but because morality and necessity demand it – he would make Labour mean something again. It wouldn’t save him or it from the horrors ahead. But it might be the manna to sustain it through the long desert trek.

Corbyn’s duty as Labour’s unlikely protector is not to win power, or even to contest it, let alone tacitly to tell recalcitrant MPs “In the name of God, go” by permitting constituency parties to deselect them. His duty is to prevent the coming civil war being Labour’s End of Days. He cannot start soon enough.