If anyone missed the depth of this national crisis, just look at the latest dire economic figures: we’re plunging towards a recession of our own making, with Britain’s first quarterly contraction in seven years. Meanwhile the two would-be prime ministers daily demonstrate their unfitness for office with ever wilder promises and preposterous claims. More fox hunting, more sugar? Both are now fatally boxed into a no-deal future with no escape hatch, hostages to Nigel Farage and the European Research Group of hardline Tory MPs.

Forget what you think about Corbyn: a partisan civil service is a threat to us all | Owen Jones Read more

Each bids to persuade the Conservative membership that only they can bar Jeremy Corbyn’s way to Downing Street. Jeremy Hunt claimed on Wednesday to be “the best person” to stop “this clear and present danger”, with Boris Johnson counter-boasting, as his lead narrows. But does the idea of Corbyn as a bogeyman to petrify all right-thinking citizens fly? Weakness, not red peril, is Labour’s electoral problem. Nothing in Labour’s last or next manifesto could be a fraction as radical as the earthquake the Brexiters have caused to Britain’s economy, its union, its internal harmony or its standing in the world. The nearest to revolutionary terror is Labour’s plan to raise the top level of tax for the richest 5% back to where it was in 2010. Popular plans to take back rail and the utilities to public ownership is hardly Venezuelan, since they leak as much money to shareholders as the water companies’ three billion litres leaked daily from broken pipes.

This week’s Times report of malevolent leaks from top civil servants warning of Corbyn’s physical and intellectual unfitness for office brought out Lord Kerslake, former head of the civil service, to tell the Today programme on Thursday that the culprits should be found and ejected. The wise and calming peer made exactly this point: the real and present danger facing the civil service and all of us is the imminent prospect of a no-deal EU crash-out.

The danger of annihilation for Labour lies not in hidden civil service enemies but its own disastrous failure to respond to the Tory-created crisis, an opposition in name only. YouGov puts Labour at just 18%, its joint lowest-ever ranking. Incredibly, the Tories lead with 24%, Brexit party on 21%, Lib Dems on 20%, Greens at 9%, SNP 4%, Plaid 1%. In the strange rollercoaster of our inadequate electoral system, with four parties relatively close, the accidental result could be a stonking majority for a party with a small share of the vote: there’s no knowing.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The two would-be prime ministers, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt (above), daily demonstrate their unfitness for office with ever wilder promises and preposterous claims.’ Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

After the 2017 election, when Labour did well, the party regularly scored in the high 30s, so this plummet can only be accounted for by Labour’s own failure to capture the passions of its overwhelmingly anti-Brexit voters. Prevarications, antediluvian anti-EU dogma from the over-mighty Len McCluskey, mumbled messages and directionless leadership in the country’s hour of greatest peril have turned away voters. The leader gives the impression that winning votes doesn’t really matter: capturing the commanding heights of the Labour party was a fulfilling enough ambition, even as votes drain away. Reports that 70 Labour MPs may face gruelling deselection battles by local party fanatics will plunge public support yet lower.

Millions desperately need to expel this Tory government, the most extreme of our lifetime, after a decade of brutal, poverty-inducing cuts. But Labour’s abysmal failure on Brexit has turned its voters to the Lib Dems, a party that voted for all this brutality just four years ago. The political ineptitude and lack of focus of Labour betrays the interests of those whom the party exists to defend. Johnson’s pitch of the day is to “narrow the gap between haves and have-nots” – breathtaking from the man whose opening bid is to gift £9bn in tax cuts to the richest 10%. But Labour in the doldrums lacks the heft to demolish such claims.

Corbyn’s disastrous dithering over the great question of the day is clear, still talking about his “jobs-first Brexit”, still “consulting”, three years after the referendum. I have every reason to believe he is in perfectly good health. What ails him is a collapse in public support: Ipsos Mori polling on leaders’ qualities this week found him miles behind Farage, Johnson and Hunt. He ranks last on “good in a crisis”, sound judgment, good representative on the world stage, and last as most capable leader: his standing lurks in a zone from which few leaders return.

Yet, due to our electoral system, he could be prime minister this year. If there is no Farage/Johnson pact, Labour could cut through the middle on a low vote. Or, if a no-deal Brexit has happened, the chaos of blocked ports, panic buying in shops, medicine shortages and the flight of business would be fertile electoral ground for Labour. But even if Labour finally arrives at a remain-referendum stance, its vote will now be sliced away by Lib Dems and Greens unless Corbyn makes a pact – a prospect tragically unlikely given his ideological obstinacy.

No one sensible can know or predict. But it’s a dismal fate for Labour supporters to find their best chance of power is through a national collapse, not through the party’s own vision, leadership and plans for the future.

• Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist