For a moment, I thought I'd got my party back – now I know that Labour is stuck in the wilderness

My preferred government would always be a centrist Labour one. So my hopes were raised by the first vote at the National Executive and then dashed by the decisive vote

Jeremy Corbyn after Tuesday's five-and-a-half hour Labour National Executive meeting

I may have overreacted because it was the first time I had heard hopeful news about the Labour Party for many years. On Wednesday afternoon we heard that the National Executive had voted by 17 to 15 to hold the rest of its votes by secret ballot.

I over-interpreted this as meaning that Jeremy Corbyn’s opponents had won the first and crucial vote, and that secret voting would make it easier for them to vote to exclude him from the ballot in the leadership election triggered by Angela Eagle.

As it turned out, some members of the National Executive wanted secret ballots in order to protect themselves and their colleagues from intimidation, regardless of whether or not they were supporters of the party leader. Johanna Baxter explained to BBC radio on Thursday: “The thing that really upset me was that the Labour Party leader voted against a proposal to have a secret ballot to protect colleagues.”

So when it finally came to the vote on whether Corbyn, as the incumbent leader, would automatically be a candidate in the leadership election, the National Executive voted to interpret the party’s ambiguous rules in his favour, by 18 to 14.

This means that Corbyn does not need to secure nominations from 50 Labour MPs and MEPs to defend his position, which is the threshold Eagle needed to meet to challenge him. He does not even need to secure nominations from 38 MPs and MEPs, which is the lower threshold he had to cross to stand in the first place (it was 35 but went up when MEPs were added to the nominating pool at last year’s annual conference).

Corbyn would find it hard to find 38 of his colleagues to nominate him. Only 40 Labour MPs supported him in the confidence motion, and seven of them have since said they want him to stand down. I don’t know how many of the party’s 20 MEPs would nominate him, but not many. When his supporters say it would be fix to keep him off the ballot paper, I would say it’s a fix to force a leader on the party who has so little support among its parliamentary representatives.

I have not been a member of the Labour Party for a decade and a half, but I still feel it is my party, and I want it to succeed. My preferred government would always be a centrist Labour one. So my hopes were raised by the first vote at the National Executive and then dashed by the decisive vote.

As we have been reminded, anything can happen in leadership elections, but now that Corbyn is a candidate he is likely to win again. Owen Smith, the former shadow Work and Pensions Secretary who announced he would be a candidate on Wednesday, may have a slightly better chance against him than Eagle, but I suspect that not enough Labour Party members are ready to give up on Corbyn yet.

Curiously, the National Executive seems to have drawn up the rules on who can take part in the leadership election in a way that probably makes it slightly harder for Corbyn. Only those full members who were members on 12 January will be eligible to take part, plus registered supporters who pay £25 between 18 and 20 July, and members of Labour-affiliated trade unions who sign up. That excludes the 130,000 members who have joined since the referendum, many of whom signed up to vote against Corbyn, but most of whom probably did so to defend him.

More important than these numbers games, however, is the quality of the candidates running against Corbyn. Eagle did quite well against Corbyn in a YouGov poll of party members at the end of last month – just 10 points behind among party members including some of the new ones. But she did vote for the Iraq war, and Corbyn’s supporters would hammer away at that all summer.

So what about Owen Smith, an MP since 2010 of whom few people had heard until recently? He told Nick Robinson on Wednesday morning that he would have voted against the Iraq war if he had been an MP then. But that is not what he said when he was an unsuccessful by-election candidate in 2006. Then he said he didn’t know whether he would have voted against the war: “I thought at the time the tradition of the Labour Party and the tradition of left-wing engagement to remove dictators was a noble, valuable tradition.”

Smith may be a better media performer than Eagle, but he may struggle to shake off the suspicion among party members that he was a Blairite – absurd that this should be an insult in the Labour Party, but that is how it is – and that he is now an opportunist.

That would mean the party has to struggle on with a leader who has, in my view, no realistic prospect of becoming prime minister. Corbyn would be challenged again next year, but Labour MPs fear than in the meantime, while “we’d be completely on our backs”, they would be vulnerable to Theresa May calling a general election.

It may be a very long time before the party I want to support will ever be in a fit state to offer itself as a credible alternative government.