Tom Watson rocks out at silent disco as Labour party crumbles around him

The deputy leader was sharing photos from Glastonbury at 4am - seemingly unaware of the crisis that had hit the party

Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, walks off stage at a Labour In for Britain event at the TUC Congress Hall on June 14, 2016 in London, England. (Getty)

As the bow of the Titanic slipped below the waves, out came the Labour Party on deckchair duty.

It was a long shift too, which came to an abrupt start when Jeremy Corbyn became the first teetotaller to sack someone at 1.30am on a Saturday night.

He’d “lost confidence” in shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn, he said, in the hours after the publication of a Sunday newspaper article claiming Benn was engineering a plot against him.

Ever since Hilary Benn talked the House of Commons into bombing Syria against his leader’s wishes, Jeremy Corbyn’s confidence in him has been of a size that would not be hard to misplace. That it became lost did not come as a surprise to anyone.

Apart from Deputy Leader Tom Watson that is, who in the midst of a crisis of leadership of the kind that the nation has arguably never known before, was snapchatting pictures of himself at the silent disco in Glastonbury at 4am. It’s arguable this was a mistake. It’s arguable he was thinking it was a mistake as he pondered over it all, whilst sitting dishevelled on the platform at Castle Cary station for several hours, waiting for a train back to London.

From 7am they came in waves: Gloria de Piero, Heidi Alexander, Ian Murray – the party’s sole Scottish MP – all went.

John McDonnell popped up on the BBC to tell Andrew Neil that, “Jeremy was going nowhere.”

He might have meant Tom Watson. A two and a half hour wait. As if missing the Sunday afternoon singalong slot with Jeff Lynne’s ELO wasn’t bad enough.

Was John McDonnell bidding for the leadership? Had his number two Seema Malhotra been ringing round, sounding people out? “Rubbish. Absolute rubbish,” he said. Within 20 minutes Seema Malhotra had resigned herself.

Lilian Greenwood, Lucy Powell and Kerry McCarthy went next.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” warned WB Yeats at the end of the world. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

Charlie Falconer was next. From a dead Irish poet not usually concerned with such matters, that’s top political punditry.

Then came Watson’s grave statement: “My single focus is to hold the Labour Party together in very turbulent times,” he said. Not so turbulent as to not head down to Glasto while things fall apart. “The nation needs an effective opposition, particularly as the current leadership of the country is so lamentable,” he added.

“It’s very clear to me that we are heading for an early general election and the Labour Party must be ready to form a government. There’s much work to do. I will be meeting Jeremy Corbyn tomorrow morning to discuss the way forward.”

What way forward is that? Next, here was Len McCluskey of Unite the Union. If Jeremy goes, the party “would be broken up” he claimed.

Of course, it is already being broken up, its core support running for Ukip and the Brexit gates while their leader occasionally told them to think about remaining.

The unions are not the only power players though. The Corbynista youth wing have just been un-unionised – European Un-unionised. Even some of them have had enough.

Things continue to fall apart. But who was behind it all? It would be unkind to draw attention to the tactics of many a serial killer, to idly pop out for milk at the critical hour, making an alibi with a CCTV camera. A silent disco’s a convenient place for a quiet assassin.