Sign up to FREE email alerts from Liverpool Echo - Weekly Politics Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

You would have needed far more than one ice cream van to cater for the thousands who turned up in the rain to listen to Jeremy Corbyn at St George’s Plateau.

But while such a show of support reflects so well on Liverpool – “It’s the most political city I know,” the late Tony Benn told me; “If there was a revolution it would start in Liverpool,” Ken Loach told me – there is no denying we’re in a mess.

The country is in a post-Brexit stupor and there are plenty of reasons to be miserable, so you’ve got to grab a laugh when you can – even if it’s a hollow one.

Cue Owen “Do you want a Flake in that?” Smith, who was providing free ice creams in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle on Saturday.

With no apparent sense of irony, he told his small gathering: “We’re stuck in an era of slogans not solutions.”

Nice slogan, Owen!

(Image: Jason Roberts)

Even funnier – no, sadder – he said: “United parties win elections, disunited parties lose elections – that’s an iron law.”

You really couldn’t make this sort of nonsense up, could you? Or maybe he was looking for compliments for his brass neck.

A disunited party? Imagine what could cause that – say, a large number of MPs throwing their dummies out of the pram and effectively saying “Sod you, Corbyn, and your landslide victory. Sod taking the battle to the Tories – sod getting behind you. Who needs unity when we can have ANOTHER leadership contest – even though you will win it again.”

If the contest does go as expected, what next? Will some of the most hopeless political plotters in the history of political plotting swallow this latest dose of democracy and show loyalty?

If they can’t work with a two-times elected leader, you could be forgiven for thinking they will resign en masse and form their own party – a kind of SDP Mark II – however depressing and divisive that might be.

There is, of course, another possibility – they will sit, sulk and fiddle while the nation burns, before saying to each other “Third time lucky?”

Nothing would surprise me.

Hang on – the plotters organising a drunken party in a brewery which goes off without a hitch... yeah, THAT would surprise me.