The key to running any successful conference is to ensure most arguments are kept behind closed doors and that any public debate is sufficiently vaguely worded to achieve consensus amid widespread disagreement. And few do it better than the Trades Union Congress. Proof that the years spent sitting at negotiating tables have not been misspent came in a whistle-stop tour of Brexit on Monday afternoon.

The session got under way with a general council statement from Steve Turner, of Unite. After what became the obligatory open-goal jibe at Boris Johnson’s expense, Turner started dancing on the head of a needle. He definitely wasn’t calling for a second vote. Because that would be undemocratic.

What he wanted was for the government to come to the right decision over Brexit – a near impossibility given the TUC is firmly opposed both to Theresa May’s Chequers proposals and a no-deal departure. But if this didn’t happen, he wanted the Tories to call a general election that Jeremy Corbyn should be allowed to win. And if for some reason this didn’t happen, the workers should “rise like lions” and demand a people’s vote. Because that would be democratic.

“This is not a call for a second referendum,” Turner insisted, clearly horrified that anyone might think it was. Though it sounded suspiciously like one. What he wanted was a people’s vote that would pave the way for a general election that Corbyn should be allowed to win. And if, in the process, the people happened to come to the conclusion that they didn’t like any of the Brexit deals on offer and wanted something else entirely – ruling nothing in or out – then so be it.

Len McCluskey, the general secretary of Unite, was up next and he too was keen to protect workers from the haplessness of the government’s Brexit negotiations. Something everyone could agree on. His solution was also for the government to call a general election that Corbyn should be allowed to win. Because then Corbyn could go back to Brussels and have “honest and friendly talks with the EU” to secure a win-win deal for both sides.

The Labour leader’s lack of enthusiasm for the EU appears to have escaped McCluskey. In this parallel universe, Corbyn has become a converted Europhile and he and Michel Barnier would raise a glass to their shared love of the single market and the customs union. And only in the vanishingly improbable scenario that May declined to call a general election that Jeremy should be allowed to win so that he and Michel could shoot the breeze over a couple of bevvies should there be a people’s vote on the final deal.

Almost all the other speakers were pretty much of the same voice. David Ward, of the Communications Workers Union, argued that he was not yet a champion of the people’s vote but that, if Corbyn was not elected prime minister, then a people’s vote was the only way to unite both remainers and Brexiters. Solidarity is the watchword of the TUC, so no one batted an eyelid at that, even though there wasn’t a person in the conference hall in Manchester who thought there was a cat in hell’s chance of either side ever coming together. The first referendum had seen to that.

The one dissenting voice came from Mick Cash, of the RMT, who reckoned that the TUC’s demands to stay in the single market were tantamount to remaining in the EU. Even though Norway and Iceland managed to be in the single market without being in the EU. But the single market wasn’t Cash’s main objection. His real gripe was that it was Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair who were demanding a people’s vote. And as they were all against Corbyn, it clearly followed that a people’s vote was a Tory plot to oust the Tories. Far better to have a no-deal Brexit and bankrupt the country than that. The real enemy wasn’t the Tories, it was the Labour moderates.

This forced Mark Serwotka, of the PCS, to say that as much as he too hated Chuka – no one wanted a Corbyn government more than him – it was also possible to be on the same side as Chuka in regard to a people’s vote without being on the same side as Chuka. The rest of the TUC agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment and voted overwhelmingly to back a people’s vote. Labour, take note.