Of course Theresa May isn’t calling a snap election, Labour is doing a fine job of destroying itself

It was Napoleon who advised against interfering ‘with an enemy while he's in the process of destroying himself’

While the Government prepares for the negotiations that will define our future, Labour seeks sanctuary from its irrelevance within its tragicomic internal affairs (Getty)

If Theresa May’s government had form in executing a tyre-melting U-turn, on some minor Budget measure or whatever, you might sprinkle any pledge from No 10 with the contents of the Saxa warehouse.

As it is, what reason could there be to doubt Downing Street’s word that the Prime Minister won’t add a snap general election to the local elections on 4 May.

The force is so strong with this one that many of her own whips and backbenchers are baffled. Why wouldn’t she want to celebrate Star Wars Day by unsheathing her trusty light sabre and lopping off Labour’s head?

Among various explanations is protecting the brand. She approved the Budget but didn’t deliver it, and the punters still trust her word. Reversing a categorical promise would undermine that.

Another theory is that the last thing she needs right now is a huge majority. The power of 20 (comparatively) centrist Tory MPs to derail legislation partly nullifies the frothing Brexit right wing to whom compromise is a synonym for treachery. David Cameron needed protection from his nutters (in that case from his Liberal Democrat partners), and so might she.

A sprint past the idea that she was spooked by Diane Abbott’s Pollyannaish insistence that Labour would storm to victory brings us to Napoleon, who advised against interfering “with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself”.

The Government’s best relief for its Brexit agonies lies in its lack of serious opposition. Why risk such precious analgesia by creating conditions whereby Labour, traumatised by crushing defeat, might elect a leader with a vague idea what he or she is doing? Already the Tories are almost 20 points ahead. Imagine their poll lead after almost four more years of this.

Finding the words to describe “this” becomes harder by the week. Raid the lexicon by all means. But unless Susie Dent from Countdown knows about some secret new noun that is 27 times stronger than “fiasco”, there will be nothing adequate in the Oxford English Dictionary any time soon.

Even the hyperbolic compounds – megadebacle, uberdisarray, gigafarce, terashambles – barely cut it. Days before Article 50 is triggered, with Britain wobbling halfway over the cliff edge like the van at the end of The Italian Job, Labour speaks only to itself. Or, more accurately, bits of itself scream at other bits like a loft full of mad aunts and uncles.

On one side of the attic, a leaked tape suggests a planned Momentum-Unite alliance to ensure the far left retains power in perpetuity. On the other, surviving Blairites stagger lividly about beneath the pulverising weight of their sense of entitlement denied. Wandering morosely about in the middle are the undead, whose craving to be rid of Jeremy Corbyn is outmatched only by fear of strengthening him with another laughable leadership challenge.

Meanwhile, Tom Watson, the Glastonbury tent bopper who moonlights as deputy leader, pours petrol on the fire by exaggerating any pact between Jon Lansman of Momentum and Unite’s Len McCluskey into an existential threat. Predictably, given the girth, Watson is way off the pace. The existential threat predates this latest eruption, and indeed Corbyn, by years. Any civil war against the Momentum-Unite axis powers would be symptom rather than cause.

So while the Government prepares for the negotiations that will define our future, Labour seeks sanctuary from its irrelevance within its tragicomic internal affairs. On Monday, after Corbyn’s people had briefed against Watson, another doozy of a PLP hate fest was enlivened by the screech of “so called leader”, while a former minister delved into the Alex Ferguson Post-Defeat Team Talk Primer to tell him to “look in a mirror”.

Inevitably, with the Home Guard bitching over banalities while the hostile forces mass across the Channel, Corbyn cast himself to type as dear old Jonesy. He made the obligatory “Don’t panic” rallying cry in the most convincing YouTube film from a Labour leader, so called or otherwise, since Gordon Brown’s Death Rictus Address on MPs’ expenses.

“Sometimes spirits in the Labour Party can run high,” he began with a tiny false chuckle in place of the demented grin. “This has been one of those days. That’s because we’re a passionate party.” Well, yeah, that’s one word for it. It’s not the right word. But then those, as discussed above, are hard to come by in this context.

He continued with a barely coded show of support for Momentum (“we need members to be activists in local communities”), which at least made some sense. The last thing a massively unpopular Emperor does is antagonise his Praetorian Guard.

In conclusion, Corbyn instructed the “whole party” – stop fannying about with that bayonet, Private Watson, he’s talking to you – to “focus on the challenges ahead”. Finally, with no discernible ironic intent, he solemnly observed that to win May’s elections “we need unity”. He didn’t specify which unity. For all the difference it would make, it might as well be the Hitler-admiring Mitford in her new from-beyond-the-grave role as Labour’s chief election strategist.

And so he goes on, this likable, honest, empathetic man, in the quest to keep proving that combat politics is not the game for the well meaning amateur. Whatever Stars Wars Day brings forth for May in the local elections, let alone if the Prime Minister performs another spectacular volte-face by also going to the country, the subtitle for Labour will not be A New Hope.