Jeremy Corbyn’s timid tortoise act risks making him a Brexit hero – and an election failure

If a deal is agreed and approved by the Commons, who would deserve the Brexit Hero of Heroes statue in Parliament Square?

You could make a case that various midwives were indispensable.

Rupert Murdoch’s 40-year campaign of EU misinformation makes him a serious rival to his placemen, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. As Steve Bannon’s official envoy from the cleanse-with-fire anarcho-maniac asylum, Dominic Cummings has a shot.

But let’s not write off the contender from the left, especially now that Jeremy Corbyn looks ready to boost his already impressive claims to the plinth.

Sunday’s media outing came after reports of a “silent coup” which leaves him Labour leader in name alone. John McDonnell has allegedly taken control following a power struggle over personnel in Corbyn’s office.

While these details must be reserved for political hypernerds, the wider ramifications may concern us all.

In six days, the Commons is slated for a rare Saturday sitting to debate any deal Johnson has done with the EU27. There is every chance it will pass, regardless of what it is.

A few days ago, I asked a hard Brexity ex-cabinet minister if he’d vote for what we took the deal to be. Yes, he said. But isn’t it worse than Theresa May’s? Yes. So you’ll vote for a worse deal than the deal that was so terrible that you thrice voted against it? Yes. Do you begin to detect the stirrings, I wondered, of a paradox? He smiled, and fell silent.

This morning, on the very Sky show that diverted Corbyn from his allotment, Sophy Ridge had a spookily similar exchange with Jacob Rees-Mogg. “The deal seems very similar to Mrs May’s which you described as completely cretinous, bureaucratic and a betrayal of common sense. So have you changed your mind?”

“Churchill often ate his own words,” the lounging lizard replied with the reptilian smugness we all enjoy so much, “and found it a nourishing diet.”

If men of such unyielding principle are happy to gorge on their hypocrisy like dogs eating their own sick, a vast majority of the ERG can be relied on to betray the ethos of their Spartan forebears.

The DUP may resist the deal and its accompanying bribes, perhaps swaying some ERG votes in the process. But with most of the expelled Tories and a fair smattering of Labour MPs expected to back it, the probability is that the deal, whatever it might be, will pass.

Of course, there is a strong chance that there will be no deal, or that the deal will be materially different from the one anticipated. If it jettisoned the border in the Irish Sea in favour of customs checks from above by Daenarys Targaryen’s surviving dragon, nothing at this stage could come as a shock.

But any deal put to the Commons on Saturday will present the moment of ultimate truth for the Remainer alliance. If Labour whipped its MPs to join the SNP, the Lib Dems, the smaller opposition parties and some of the Tory outcasts, it would probably have the numbers to mandate a second referendum offering both the deal and the option to remain.

This is what the party’s larger beasts and most of its members (regardless of that blatant conference stitch-up) plainly want, and what Keir Starmer apparently thinks is the policy. “If Boris Johnson does manage to negotiate a deal,” he said yesterday, “we will insist that it is put back to the people in a confirmatory vote.”

Here, as elsewhere, Corbyn remains an unusually nervous tortoise. From time to time, under pressure, he’s poked out his head, looked approvingly on a referendum, instantly taken fright, and retracted it.

A few days ago, with all the momentum for holding a referendum before a general election, Corbyn appeared to concur.

Today he withdrew into his shell, cautioning against subjecting any deal to a people’s vote before an election.

Too much energy has been wasted bemoaning the obfuscation, vacillation, conscientious objecting and absenteeism without leave that has alienated swathes of supporters during this silly little proxy civil war.

Even surviving superfans sense in their bones that he’s blown it; that the miracle of the last election won’t be repeated against a different Tory opponent in the afterglow of a deal spun by the papers (the ones that depicted May’s doppelganger deal as Chamberlain-esque appeasement) as a Churchillian triumph.

A tortoise of enviably rigid self-belief, he must reckon he will catch the hare, as he almost did two years ago, and overtake it on the line. Perhaps, as then, he is right and everyone else is mistaken. But all the odds and polls say otherwise, and the fact that they were wrong before has no predictive bearing on the future.

Equally, the fact that time has been so short for so long doesn’t mean the next final moment of truth won’t be just that. If a deal with the EU is struck, Saturday almost certainly will be the Commons’ last chance to legislate for a second referendum.

If so, there are fewer than six days either for Corbyn to have his mind decisively changed – which on the form book looks a long shot – or for John McDonnell to launch a more effective coup than the silent one which seems to have proceeded through the U-bend like its noisier predecessors.

Failing that, if he enables the passing of a deal with no referendum attached, the campaign to immortalise Jeremy Corbyn in marble starts next Sunday. But in that event, whether he gets the statue or no more than a small panel in the Brexeaux Tapestry, he will be forever remembered as a hero of this benighted age.