W HEN CHATTER from senior civil servants wondering whether Jeremy Corbyn was too frail for Downing Street ended up on the Times’s front page on June 29th, the Labour leader’s supporters sprang into action. The teetotal Mr Corbyn’s fitness “is legendary”, declared Jon Trickett, the shadow cabinet-office minister (“Legendary!” chorused Labour MP s assembled behind him). The 70-year-old allotment-botherer “is much fitter than me, and I’m 31,” insisted Laura Pidcock, another devout shadow minister, who said the leaked comments from Whitehall showed that the establishment was “immensely threatened by our electoral prospects”.

Any member of the establishment worried about a Corbyn government can relax, at least for a bit. Labour’s polling numbers have slumped. A reckoning on its Brexit position looms. The party’s failure to handle anti-Semitism within its ranks has flared up, again. And while the government is on the ropes, Labour MP s are having to spend their time sweet-talking activists into reselecting them. The party once again faces a summer of discontent.

Rather than going on the offensive, Labour has turned in on itself. On June 24th it gave its MP s a fortnight to decide whether to stand at the next election, which is scheduled for 2022 but could come as soon as this autumn. If they do, MP s may face deselection attempts from disaffected members, who now benefit from rules aimed at making it easier to get rid of a representative. MP s will have to spend the summer buttering up local activists, rather than winning over floating voters (or heading to the beach).

The biggest headache, however, is Brexit. Labour has lost four times as many voters to the pro-Remain Liberal Democrats and Greens as it has to the Brexit Party, according to the party’s internal analysis. Since a poor result in the European election in May, some of Mr Corbyn’s closest allies, such as Diane Abbott, the shadow home secretary, and John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, have called for the party to give its clear support to the idea of a second referendum in which it would campaign for Remain. But the leader’s office has resisted. A Brexit-related culture war slices through Labour’s historical alliance of middle-class public-sector workers, who tended to vote Remain, and the working class, who often backed Leave. The party’s Brexit policy has been built on placating the former, who are more numerous, while not scaring off the latter.

Its slow shuffle towards a Remain position has already come at a cost. Of all front-rank politicians, Mr Corbyn is least trusted on Brexit, surveys show. Labour should have heeded Macbeth’s advice, says Marcus Roberts, a pollster with YouGov: if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly. “The longer this goes, the greater the scale of the damage,” says Mr Roberts. “Whatever you are going to do, do it hard, clean and now.”

Labour is betting that today’s polls bear little relation to how people might vote were an election called tomorrow. The party rallied by 20 points during the course of the general-election campaign in 2017. Brexit casts a pall over everything, says Mr McDonnell. When it is sorted, voters will return. Not all share his hopefulness. “Down” is how one aide describes the mood in the party. The optimism that gripped Labour in the wake of its 2017 performance is dead.