Can Tom Watson save Labour?

The phrase ‘existential crisis’ is thrown around too easily. But it is hard to find a better description of the state of the Labour party, whose members and supporters overwhelmingly oppose Brexit but whose leader and advisors cling to the old Communist party line that the EU is a ‘capitalist club’. Previously solid followers of Jeremy Corbyn — Clive Lewis in Norwich, Lloyd Russell-Moyle in Brighton and many leftish London MPs — know that Brexit may cost them their seats. And nothing makes a politician move faster than the prospect of unemployment.

Even Labour can’t stagger on like this indefinitely. Tom Watson will mount a hostile leadership challenge to Jeremy Corbyn if none of the party’s other pro-Europeans is willing to extricate Labour from the wreckage of Brexit. As millions of supporters peel off to the Liberal Democrats, nationalists and Greens, and as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage threaten to shift Britain decisively to the right, Watson is at the end of his tether — and it is easy to see why.

Labour’s crisis is as much moral as political. To the young, who projected their fantasies of what a socialist leader should be on to Corbyn’s bland features, his Brexit policy is an almost personal betrayal. A year ago, they could fool themselves that ‘Jeremy’ was playing a tactical game: that underneath his ‘constructive ambiguity’ (and what a weasel euphemism for dishonesty that was) his heart was in the right place. No one can believe that now. If liberals and leftists want to oppose Brexit, they have to oppose Corbyn.

No one I’ve spoken to in Labour believes recent reports that he is suffering from  a mysterious malady that has left him ‘too frail’ to become PM. He looks like yesterday’s man because he is a narcissist, who loved the applause of the Glastonbury crowds and knows now that his support for Brexit and inability to break from the anti-Semites who have surrounded him throughout his career have cost him their adulation.