It's funny, isn’t it — funny in a manic, hysterical, weeping, post-Brexit sort of way — that the Conservatives’ big sell at the last election was that you could trust them with the economy. A little more than a year later, the pound has fallen to a 31-year low, we’ve lost the AAA credit rating that George Osborne told us was so crucial, the FTSE is spiralling, and, you know, race hate increasing, the United Kingdom falling apart, the far-Right marching…

How could Labour’s supposedly radical policies — a higher minimum wage, more social housing, a de-privatised NHS, increased workers’ rights — possibly do more damage than Tory recklessness, I wonder? For while Britain voted Leave for a multitude of reasons, it was the Conservative Party which put all these squirming motivations through the mincer of a referendum, and Tory voters — by and large — who guided the result. And if ever an opposition were needed to pick up the pieces, it is now.

But, as Tolstoy wrote, all happy families are the same and each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. And just as the Tory family has inflicted its own weird pathologies — the Bwussels Complex? — upon the nation, so Labour is doing the same with its own dysfunction du jour: Integrity Syndrome.

I was a Jeremy Corbyn agnostic. I could never be fully convinced by a man who became leader by mistake but I was sympathetic to the ideas and emotions that pushed him into that position. None of the other candidates were more convincing. Labour’s senior politicians (can we retire the silly slur “Blairites”?) were often arrogant and reluctant to recognise neoliberal shortcomings. And I know admirable, honourable people who have put heart and soul into trying to make Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour what it should be.

But I don’t believe Corbyn has repaid their faith. You can decry the “MSM” (mainstream media) all you want, talk about a “new way of doing politics” or the “feeling in the room”. He’s just not found ways to communicate beyond that room. And if a Labour leader can’t do that, he’s not going to win an election any time soon.

The Parliamentary Labour Party knows this. 172 MPs at least! The problem is, Corbyn doesn’t care. It’s not from Labour MPs that he gets his mandate, he argues, it’s from the party members who voted for him in the leadership election and promise to do so again (many of them paid £3 and want to get their money’s worth).

In this view, Corbyn’s duty is more to the however-many-thousands who cheered him outside Parliament on Monday (some of whom had Socialist Workers Party banners and T-shirts saying things like “Eradicate the Right-Wing Blairite Vermin”) than to the however-many millions of constituents who voted for the MPs in his party.

Here lies Corbyn’s integrity. His syndrome if you like. One that he is inflicting upon all those who rely upon there being a coherent progressive party in Britain.

There is a more honourable course open to Corbyn. He could step aside and endorse a continuity candidate in a new leadership election. Maybe even mend bridges with Angela Eagle? It should be someone who can carry his momentum (as it were) but who doesn’t see “moderate” as an insult. Someone who can communicate, collaborate and — dare I say it? — compromise occasionally.

The alternative is that an individual famed for his integrity will destroy a movement of millions through his own egotism. And who’ll be laughing then?

We should try to be more like Iceland

Miraculously, a few minutes into the Iceland game on Monday, I realised that England’s torpid ineptitude didn’t hurt anymore. I had felt so many shades of disappointment, anguish and embarrassment since Friday that the small matter of losing to some cheerful hipsters counted as light relief. I was genuinely delighted for them when they won.

It also helped me to fast-forward through the phases of Brexit grief (anger, denial, e-petitioning, depression) and broach the final one: acceptance. Then a more hopeful vision of the future began to form.

Isn’t Iceland also a weather-lashed island community with an eccentric population, valiant literary and musical traditions and cavalier financiers? Aren’t our flags pretty similar (if you get rid of the crosses of Scotland and Northern Ireland, heh heh?) Doesn’t Iceland manage to articulate a progressive and confident vision of itself outside of the EU? Might we one day reach a quarter-final? Some day, maybe.

Istanbul needs our support

Istanbul is one of the most inspiring, strange, absorbing and (obviously) infuriating cities I’ve visited. Living in an area of London where wi-fi zones are named after its football teams — I write this in Fenerbahçe territory, N4 — and there are regular protests against both Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Islamic State, I feel the attack on Atatürk airport as a semi-local event.

I’m also going there in three weeks. I was a little nervous about the city’s volatility before and I’m anxious now. There’s a fine line between morality and pragmatism too: am I not giving in to terrorism, or not giving in to losing money on a flight? But I have to ask: would I cancel a trip to Paris or Brussels? And if we withdraw from Istanbul — a city with more claim to be the centre of the world than London — isn’t that giving up on life?

Ralph digs deep as Richard III

Ever since Richard III was disinterred from his car park in Leicester, I’ve been looking forward to a toothsome production of Shakespeare’s history play. At the Almeida, Rupert Goold has seized the moment. His production begins with an archaeological dig in the present day, before Ralph

Fiennes rattles and schemes magnificently as the naughty Plantagenet.

Goold’s framing device could so easily have been a gimmick. But as I stepped on to the Islington asphalt, I thought of the twisted bodies and thwarted ambitions that must lie below. “Look, what is done cannot be now amended:/ Men shall deal unadvisedly sometimes,/ Which after-hours give leisure to repent.”