Oh, Labour – 118 characters, 23 words, and the awfulness of the party’s current position has been revealed in full. “Real fight starts now,” tweeted Jeremy Corbyn, or whoever does these things for him, in the aftermath of the House of Commons’ second vote on article 50. “Over next two years Labour will use every opportunity to ensure Brexit protects jobs, living standards & the economy.”

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In among a whole universe of online mirth, there was one particularly cutting strand of reply, repeated over and over again, and reducible to a simple point: as one wit put it, “First rule of ‘Real fight starts now’ club – turn up when the fight is over.” My personal favourite came from the musician Martin Carr: “*Puts baby in lion’s mouth* ‘The real fight starts now. Over the next 2 yrs Labour will use every opportunity … Oh, it’s eaten it.’”

Of course, the usual health warning applies: for the most part, you should never mistake an explosion on your timeline for anything halfway real. But among what might now be Labour’s true “core” support – liberal-inclined people who voted remain, and feel anxious beyond belief about where Britain has ended up – something has definitely shifted these last few weeks, and all those tweets and Facebook posts are among the proof.

I know once-passionate Corbyn supporters who are now racked with doubt about the man they once believed in, and about his handling of such a watershed political moment; others who joined the party after the 2015 election with a sense of almost moral duty, but who are among the 7,000 or so people who have reportedly stopped their standing orders and chucked it in. These are not fickle types either, but people who practise their politics because of deep passions, and immovable principles. Put simply, they are at their wits’ end. Who can blame them?

Martin Carr (@martin_carr) @jeremycorbyn *Puts baby in lion's mouth* "The real fight starts now. Over the next 2 yrs Labour will use every opportuni oh it's eaten it"

Their angst, moreover, goes further back than the pantomime around the two votes on article 50. In many cases it arises from the knowledge that Labour may now be in an almost impossible political position, so confounding that to speculate about who might be the next leader (Clive Lewis? Keir Starmer? The renowned Rebecca Long-Bailey?) is to ignore the depth of the crisis. The result of the referendum and the supposed chasm between leave and remain voters have exposed the same class divides now paralysing centre-left parties across Europe and beyond. But in a British context, what makes that realisation all the more painful is a rising sense that Corbyn and his allies might be at least partly to blame.

In other words, eight months on from 23 June 2016, there are plenty of Labour people who are haunted by the culpability of the current leadership for Brexit. It is not hard to trace the story back: from John McDonnell’s claim last November that leaving the EU was nothing less than an “enormous opportunity”, through Corbyn’s absurd post-referendum insistence that article 50 ought to be triggered immediately, and into a whole mess of stuff around the campaign to stay in the EU – surely the quintessential “real fight” – and the dreadful record of the people in charge of the party.

For the details, have a read of All Out War, the accomplished instant history of the referendum written by the Sunday Times’ political editor Tim Shipman. I know, he’s a Murdoch man, but Shipman tells his story in cool, dispassionate terms, and the Labour elements of it are backed up by everyone from backbenchers to former ministers.

It is all there, in a chapter titled Labour’s Not Working: “For months, Corbyn and his office resisted calls by [Alan] Johnson and the Labour In campaign to declare his personal support for staying in Europe”; “Corbyn would film fortnightly Facebook videos telling his supporters what he was doing. It would have been natural, in the midst of a historic election campaign to devote one to the EU. He refused.”

One recollection from Will Straw, the Stronger In campaign director and 2015 Labour candidate, says it all: “It took six months for me to get a single meeting with Jeremy Corbyn’s team, and that was the only meeting. In March. It was basically hopeless. He didn’t want to engage.”

Given the closeness of the vote, there is a strong argument that this is one of the key reasons why the referendum was lost. Moreover, if the party leadership’s approach to the remain campaign was such a fiasco, how could it capably navigate its way through what happened next?

Put another way, with Brexit now part of the same global mess as the coming to power of Donald Trump, how can a leadership that has so let down its own supporters and engaged in such awful doublespeak – affecting to be pro-EU, but constantly tilting in the opposite direction – even begin to answer people’s need for political clarity, let alone hope?

We all know the answer to that: as the shambles of the last few months has proved, Corbyn and his people are locked into deep political failure. Given their flat-out refusal to countenance opposing the Brexit bill, Labour’s red lines have turned out not to be red lines at all. The party has no coherent position on the single market, and the dire consequences of leaving it.

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Labour runs Wales, along with just about all the big cities in England – but the deep fears of its politicians in charge of those places find no echo in the tepid rhetoric at the top. On Wednesday night we saw the strange spectacle of Labour proposing what looked like crucial amendments to the article 50 bill – on the NHS, the rights of EU nationals, and the prospect of the UK becoming a tax haven – and then after their rejection trooping through the lobbies with the Tories regardless.

Diane Abbott said that the way Labour MPs were told to vote “does not mean that we have to accept Brexit in the haphazard way in which it is being handed to us”. A more convincing view was put by the Greens’ Caroline Lucas. The unamended bill, she said, was the “blueprint for an extreme Tory Brexit and Labour waved it through”.

Beyond the Corbynites and furious Labour remainers, there is another position. One senior Labour MP told me this week that the danger of the moment is that too many people on the left are either clinging to the idea that the decision to leave the EU might somehow be reversed, or obsessing over milder versions of Brexit, and averting their eyes from an urgent task – accepting our exit, and coming up with a convincing vision of the future that might somehow bring back the old Labour heartlands that voted leave. To that, there are two answers. First, the hard Brexit the government is pursuing is highly likely to cause no end of pain, and if Labour had any kind of long view, it would have long since set out a strong case for soft Brexit, and used it as the cornerstone of its approach to the rest of this parliament. Second, even if the party accepts the “move on” argument, it is going to take skilled leadership to make a go of it. But what signs are there of that?

Which brings us back to Real Fight Starts Now Club, and a few requirements so basic that most tweeters did not think to mention them: competence, vision, consistency, and a modicum of strategic nous. Does anyone at the top still have any of that stuff? Or is Labour now so collectively befuddled that all hope is lost?