Give the grown-ups back control of the Labour party. Wasn’t that supposed to be the idea? Yet with each fresh turn of events, the coup against Jeremy Corbyn looks less like an adult intervention, and more like a slapstick farce.

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First the party establishment tried to overturn the result of a leadership election held just eight months earlier by resigning en masse to make Corbyn’s position untenable. When this failed, they sought to exclude him from the leadership ballot, in a disingenuous attempt to circumvent rules that were perfectly clear on his right to stand. When this was unsuccessful, a millionaire party donor tried to challenge the decision in the high court, which also failed. Today, in a second legal defeat, a high court judge has struck down an attempt by the party’s national executive to stop 130,000 of Labour’s newest members, thought to be mostly Corbyn supporters, from voting in the coming leadership election.

Meanwhile, apparently having no plan for what to do if Corbyn simply pointed to his mandate and refused to resign, MPs dithered for over a fortnight before producing an alternative party leader. They then found themselves with two rival “unity candidates” – Angela Eagle and Owen Smith – before Eagle dropped out just eight days after a cringe-inducing car crash of a campaign launch. We are now into the seventh week of a spectacle which, altogether, has not exactly been a showcase of managerial competence from the self-styled party “moderates”.

Nor have the last few weeks been a great advert for the Labour establishment’s election-winning skills. A basic principle of electability, whether the battleground is the party selectorate or the national electorate, is that one should avoid antagonising the very people whose votes you need to win. Yet the party executive now plans to waste members’ money appealing against today’s court decision, in the hope of disenfranchising tens of thousands of those same members. This will hardly endear the membership to MPs and party bosses who owe their lucrative careers to the donations and voluntary labour of the party rank-and-file. And it will clearly rebound to damaging effect on the party establishment’s candidate, Smith.

The mantra of Corbyn’s opponents is that the party needs to provide effective opposition to the government, yet here again their incompetence is glaring. The Brexit vote, especially its calamitous economic effects, provided a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do lasting damage to the Conservative brand, and raise the chances of a future Labour victory under whichever leadership. The immediate crash in the value of the pound and the longer-term damage to the British economy is arguably worse than 1992’s Black Wednesday, and should have been hung around the necks of the Tories from the moment the markets tumbled after the result came in.

Voters should be reminded constantly that the pound in their pocket is now worth considerably less thanks to ministers who either campaigned for a leave vote, failed to plan for it, or both. Conservative responsibility for every ounce of economic pain to be felt in the coming years must be seared into the public consciousness. This one-off opportunity has been squandered so far, simply because the geniuses of New Labour didn’t have the strategic sense to sequence their moves, and wait for the next opportunity to depose Corbyn.

Of course, Labour’s civil war is rooted not in questions of competence but in fundamental political differences between the two opposite wings of the party – differences which are probably irreconcilable. Corbyn is the clear odds-on favourite to win, not because his leadership operation is a shining example of professionalism, but because – for now at least – he is the only available champion for the basic political principles shared by most party members.

Smith’s pitch, of Corbynite policies plus effective leadership, was a smart one in this context, but it is likely to fail for two reasons. First, no one seriously believes that Smith came into politics to overturn the neoliberal consensus. Second, it is clear that a Smith victory would return the party to the ownership of its previous managerial class. The shenanigans in the courts this week are a symbol of why, for most Labour members, a return to the status quo ante is now simply unthinkable.