When are Jeremy Corbyn’s enemies going to get their act together? Today’s Times poll of the Labour membership shows that they would get a rather cold reception if they tried to remove the Labour leader, with 72 per cent telling YouGov that Corbyn is doing well, up from 66 per cent in November. Members are slightly less upbeat about the party’s prospects for actually governing, with 53 per cent believing it will be in government after the 2020 election, and 47 per cent saying Corbyn is likely to become Prime Minister. They also largely think that the 5 May elections went well for the party, with 67 per cent saying the party did well overall, and the same percentage saying the party did well in the local elections specifically, even though no Opposition has lost seats at this stage since the 1980s.

Labour MPs today are not particularly cheered by these findings, naturally. They were already coming to this conclusion last week based on their interactions with their own members, and in the Spectator politics column I reported that the rebels who had been pushing for a coup against Corbyn had called it off. They realised that he was, as one possible contender to take over put it, ‘too weak to win but too strong to remove’.

Indeed, none of the possible contenders seem to excite any enthusiasm amongst members, with the YouGov poll recording Andy Burnham as the most popular candidate after Corbyn if there were an election now. When asked who they would give their first preference to, 43 per cent of members said Corbyn, 10 per cent said Burnham, followed by 9 per cent for Dan Jarvis, 8 per cent for Yvette Cooper and 6 per cent for John McDonnell. Even Lisa Nandy, talked up as the possible palatable soft left candidate, only scores 1 per cent of the vote. Members are not particularly enamoured with Labour MPs in general, with 62 per cent blaming Labour MPs who oppose Jeremy Corbyn for the divisions in the party, 15 per cent blaming Corbyn, 21 per cent saying both are to blame, and 2 per cent blaming someone else.

For many Labour MPs, this is confirmation that a coup would only look ridiculous and strengthen Corbyn further. But some think it is actually confirmation that the members are never going to realise that their party leader isn’t going to take Labour back into government, and that therefore they might as well stage a coup now - but this is a minority view.

The hopelessness of the situation means that even more MPs are starting to wonder whether they might achieve more with their lives if they just leave parliament altogether. I have never had as many conversations about career development as I have with Labour MPs over the past month or so, with so many of them starting to make contacts in sectors where they’d like to work after politics and tidying up their CVs.

Unhappily, these MPs who are thinking of stepping down (or are at least resigning themselves to losing their seat either in the boundary review or as a result of the electoral devastation that they predict their party will face in 2020) tend, in my view at least, to be the very sort of parliamentarians that Westminster needs more of: people who like getting stuff done and who can’t face another five years of not being able to do that on the backbenches of an even smaller Opposition party. But they seem to be resigning themselves to a very miserable stalemate in their party which will only end with them escaping the Commons for a new life.