I don’t really know where to start, to be quite honest with you.

I guess we’ll start at the cataclysmic moment that gave those enacting the coup the moment they’ve been waiting for to try and dethrone Jeremy Corbyn, namely, the result of the EU referendum. After all, they’ve been waiting for a while. It was reported in The Telegraph in May that Margaret Hodge was going to be the one to deliver the first blow to Corbyn, and even before that, it was inferred that the plot to overthrow the democratically elected leader of the Labour Party has been in the works for months, with speculation suggesting that it was in preparation before the Oldham by-election. However, the unexpected Leave vote in the EU referendum gave them, in their opinion, the perfect chance to strike.

To me, anyway, that didn’t make sense to begin with. It was the first of many acts of incompetence shown by the plotters. Their attempts to blame Jeremy Corbyn for the EU referendum result and simultaneously use that assertion to push the claim that he is unelectable were based on the kind of intellectual gymnastics that we’ve come to expect from the Parliamentary Labour Party, but even by their standards, it was baseless.

Not only was Corbyn and his ‘reluctant remain’ position far more in tune with public opinion that the rest of the Europhiles in the Parliamentary Labour Party, but a recent study by Loughborough University suggested that Corbyn had a much larger media presence than any other prominent figure in the Labour ‘In’ campaign — the idea that he was shying away from the debate on the European Union is a complete and utter myth. Polling guru John Curtice puts forward a compelling argument defending Corbyn here. Moreover, considering they had to get the young vote out to stand a chance of doing well, it is beyond belief that the supposed leader of this campaign, Alan Johnson, doesn’t even have a Twitter account. Presumed challenger to Corbyn’s leadership, Angela Eagle, has also recently changed her tune on Corbyn’s efforts on the campaign trail. Only a few weeks ago, she was incredibly complimentary about Corbyn’s efforts. It was clear from the very beginning that this was nothing to do with the EU referendum — but control of the Labour Party.

What’s changed, Angela?

What the plotters fail to understand is that Jeremy Corbyn is one of the people best placed to reconnect with the working class heartlands that voted leave. As I mentioned in a previous post, it was the abandonment of left-wing Euroscepticism and the working class under Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair that sowed the seeds for this very event. I still maintain that no matter who the leader of the Labour Party was at the time of the referendum, those 30% of Labour leavers were not going to be persuaded otherwise, especially not by the patronising soft left bilge that would have been peddled by Burnham, Cooper and/or Kendall. To suggest that Corbyn is the cause instead of the solution for the situation we find ourselves in is farcical. That rant, however, is for another day — but this article by Len McCluskey is very good.

Since the fateful day that Margaret Hodge (whose constituency overwhelmingly voted to leave, by the way) was wheeled out on the news channels to condemn Corbyn, the coup plotters have managed to turn themselves into a national laughing stock. The people who have been blasting Jeremy Corbyn and calling for ‘effective leadership’ have literally shown themselves up to be some of the most ineffective, inept politicians in Parliament at the moment.

Once again, I’m struggling to decide where to begin — there have been that many cockups over the last week. Most of the cockups I can laugh at, but there is one that genuinely sickens me to the core. In Diane Abbott’s Guardian article, she claims that the first Parliamentary Labour Party meeting since the coup begun was based around ‘breaking him (Corbyn) as a man’. Firstly, for Corbyn to be used as a verbal punching bag for MPs who couldn’t even persuade their own constituencies to vote to Remain is beyond hypocritical. Secondly, the idea that this wasn’t even about a policy platform, but about Corbyn himself, really bothers me. In my opinion, any member of Parliament that was guilty of trying to ‘break him as a man’ — namely, bully an elected leader out of office, should be expelled from the party with immediate effect. Furthermore, this barrage of hatred was the only card that the coup plotters could play — and they knew it.

Their assumption that Corbyn was a weak enough character to give in to the pressure of mass shadow cabinet resignations and a barrage of abuse ignores the fact that he has been up against it his entire political career. He has stood firm against all of this, meaning that he immediately contradicted the plotters’ main complaint — his supposed weakness.

Recap: the supposed ‘plan’, if you can call it that, was to put him under so much pressure that he had to resign. Instead, their actions have meant that we now have the loyal Shadow Cabinet that we should have had from the very beginning of Corbyn’s leadership and at least 60,000 engaged new members. Good coup, guys.

As I said earlier, the sheer ineptidude of the coup plotters has a brilliant tinge of irony. These are the people who are calling for ‘effective leadership’. In reality, they couldn’t run a bath themselves. Not only that, but their inability to actually field a candidate to challenge Corbyn thus far shows that they have spines of jelly.

I mean, they’ve had the domain names for SavingLabour and Angela Eagle’s campaign ready since the 25th June (despite Eagle quoting Benn’s subsequent sacking as her reason for resigning) — but every day they threaten to run, try and call Corbyn’s bluff and force him to resign, fail miserably and wonder what to do next. It is seemingly obvious to everyone besides the plotters that they desperately don’t want to run, which begs the question why they’re even bothering with these games. It’s safe to say that Angela Eagle & co are not members of the House of Commons’ poker society.

What happens next? Well either they challenge him, or they don’t. They have to put up or shut up. Which one would I prefer? I don’t even know anymore. I’d be more than happy for them to challenge Corbyn’s leadership, because everybody knows they’d lose. However, at a time when the Labour Party should be focusing on defending migrants who have been increasingly targeted and demonised since the Brexit vote, and appealing to the working class heartlands that we have so shamefully abandoned over the last two decades — it is clear that there are an infinite number of better things we could be doing over the summer than running a leadership contest that would both be a foregone conclusion and potentially create an irreparable split in the Labour Party.

Do I see a split as inevitable? That completely depends on whether a portion of the PLP continue being the self serving ideologues that they’ve proven to be over the last week. My thinking was always that we should be conciliatory to the right of the Labour Party, and those who don’t necessarily agree with everything that Jeremy Corbyn stands for in order to ensure party unity. Labour is a broad church, after all. However, by plotting this dangerous, self-serving, ideologically motivated coup and then having the brass neck to claim it is in the ‘national interest’ — the plotters have spat in the face of every single Jeremy Corbyn supporter who thought the same as I did.

One conclusion that I can draw from this sorry experience is that I have no qualms in saying that this coup is the main reason why I now wholeheartedly back mandatory reselection and a full Bennite democratising program within the Labour Party, regardless of whether a leadership challenge actually happens or not.

The other is that this attempt at overthrowing Jeremy Corbyn has been nothing but a shambles, and the instigators should be utterly ashamed of themselves. Not only because their actions were deeply irresponsible, divisive and undemocratic — but they didn’t even make a good job of it. Last year’s victory for Corbyn in the Labour leadership election showed that the Parliamentary Labour Party were lacking effective policies, strategies and tactics. It is clear from this sorry mess that not much has changed.