Labour is a remain party,” Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, said on Saturday night to a room in Brighton that exploded. Emily Thornberry arrived at the People’s Vote rally wearing a blue top with a necklace of golden stars, calling for Labour to become the party of remain. Keir Starmer, John McDonnell, Diane Abbott, Clive Lewis, Tom Watson: all of the high-ranking members of the shadow cabinet are openly remain. Some 90% of constituency Labour party motions on Brexit call for the party to campaign unambiguously for remain. It has the features of a showdown not between the leadership and the members but between a very tight inner circle – which no longer even includes McDonnell, the shadow chancellor – and everybody else. But atmospherically, it feels more like an ultimatum delivered in a rocky relationship. “Do this or I’ll leave” is never the starting point of the row, or even its apex. By the time that person says it, and means it, the balance of power has already shifted.

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Jeremy Corbyn must be wishing there was some way he could prorogue his own conference – maybe get the Queen involved. He appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show on Sunday morning, categorically giving Labour’s Brexit stance before conference had even discussed it. That position was both trenchant and incredibly confusing. First there would be a general election, in which Labour would triumph; that hypothesis Corbyn was happy to discuss and build plans around. Then he would renegotiate a deal with the EU, according to five pillars; then he’d take that deal, set against remain, to the country for a people’s vote. Which side he would support himself, he couldn’t possibly guess, he told Marr, because it was a hypothesis. Labour, meanwhile, wouldn’t decide its final position until a “special conference”, even though it is in the middle of its annual conference.

The national executive committee, meanwhile, was trying to get this complicated, vexed and controversial position agreed by an email vote in the couple of hours ahead of Sunday evening, where members’ motions are combined into one votable proposition. Members of the leader’s team were pacing conference floor before the meeting in an extraordinary effort to drum up loyalty. A year ago this would have looked like bureaucratic blocking of the most dangerous kind, designed to gut the meaning out of the democratic process. This year, the machinations are so underpowered, so uncertain, that they’re just making the machine look bad. This is no longer a question of where the party stands on membership of the EU: we know Labour’s destination. The question is who will survive the landing, and in what kind of shape.

Why does only the deputy leadership have to reflect diversity? Why not run every role in the party as a job-share?

This is why Len McCluskey, Seumas Milne, Andrew Murray and Karie Murphy – the four-M axis – is so uncharacteristically lacklustre on Brexit. This is why conference opened against the backdrop of the bizarre attempt to depose Watson as deputy leader, an issue that drew a rare expression of opprobrium from former leader Ed Miliband and over which 35 MPs were instantly prepared to resign, with rumours putting the possible total nearer 50.

If you wanted to take aim against remain, Watson would not be your main foe. He has only a small cadre of his own loyalists. He is not the lightning rod for either the left’s case against Brexit or the centre’s. It is implausible to think of his launching a leadership challenge of his own. Really, all Watson embodies is continuity with the Blair/Brown years. So the attempt to get rid of him as deputy leader had to be about succession planning: a clumsy attempt to try to repopulate the offices around Corbyn, so that when his anointed one – whoever she is (more on the use of that pronoun shortly) – stood, she wouldn’t be thwarted.

However, it seems likely that the motivation was more short term even than that. It was driven by the likelihood that the supreme court will find against the government this week, but nobody knows what the ramifications are; that a possible vote of no confidence against the government can succeed only with an interim prime minister more unifying than Corbyn; and that the idea of a government of national unity might be suddenly revivified. In times so febrile that outcomes go from unthinkable to inevitable then back again in an afternoon, the politician who would naturally and conventionally understudy for Corbyn has a huge amount of power. The attempt to rid the party of Watson was a red herring, really. The most important move made by the NEC was to successfully overturn the element of the job title “deputy”, which means he will no longer automatically deputise.

This doesn’t leave the leadership with any security, however: it leaves open the question of who would lead the Labour party in any of the multiple scenarios in which Corbyn is not heading up an interim or national unity government. It opens that space up to genuine challengers for control of the party.

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Corbyn and his allies are using the language of feminism and diversity to reassert some dominance; the post of deputy has to be split in two, because one of them has to be a woman, to “reflect the diversity of our country”, Corbyn told Marr. This is transparently cynical and utterly illogical (why does only the deputy leadership have to reflect diversity? Why not run every role in the party as a job-share?). As an argument, it doesn’t work on any level.

Labour may look divided and its conference baffling, with policy announcements always vying with feuds for headlines. But paradoxically, these divisions do not signal uncertainty: it is because the uncertainty over Brexit has lifted, the era of “strategic ambiguity” has passed, that the endgame has begun.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist