Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party must leave behind internal feuding and start talking to voters

When Jeremy Corbyn read the riot act to his Shadow Cabinet on 10 November to demand discipline and collective responsibility, he surprised and angered many of its members.

Not only did they leave the meeting grumbling about taking lessons in discipline from a serial rebel who has voted against the Labour whip more than 500 times since 1997. They noted another irony: Mr Corbyn’s new politics of openness and debate seemed remarkably like the old politics as he asked for frontbench statements to be cleared by his office. “We have gone from letting a thousand flowers bloom to command and control in two months,” one shadow minister groaned.

In the line of Mr Corbyn’s fire was Maria Eagle, the shadow Defence Secretary. She had agreed with remarks by Sir Nicholas Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, who told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show he would “worry” if Mr Corbyn became prime minister because his refusal to press the nuclear button would undermine the credibility of the British deterrent, currently the Trident system. Ms Eagle shares Sir Nicholas’s view that Trident should be renewed, while Mr Corbyn is a unilateralist who hopes to persuade his party to support scrapping it.

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What Ms Eagle should have said was that Sir Nicholas had crossed an important constitutional line by straying into party politics. The issue here is not Trident but the duty of public servants to obey the wishes of a legitimately elected prime minister. The service chiefs seem to think they are a law unto themselves. We have already had dark warnings from generals about “mutiny” and “mass resignations at every level” if Mr Corbyn enters Downing Street. Sir Nicholas went public, and the Labour leader had every right to complain. Although Number 10 backed Sir Nicholas, in some western countries he would have been sacked. I doubt Conservative ministers would have been so relaxed if Sir Jeremy Heywood, the Cabinet Secretary, had told the Marr Show the proposed cuts to tax credits would hit the nation’s strivers. Serving officials should be seen but not heard. There are enough armchair generals already retired from the armed services to make their case; they are rarely off our TV screens.

The hostile Shadow Cabinet reaction to Mr Corbyn’s edict was another sign of a party divided into two armed camps. When Corbynistas obsess about “regime change”, they are not talking about Syria, but the plotting by Labour MPs determined to topple the party leader before the 2020 general election. Some critics believe he is a walking disaster who could lose 100 of the party’s 232 Commons seats. Some on the Labour right are enjoying the return of trench warfare – more evidence of the old politics. But most Labour MPs I talk to seem lost in a fog of depression. Some busy themselves in constituency projects. Others fear deselection and worry more about the views of the new pro-Corbyn party members than those of their constituents --an ominous sign of a party turning inwards. Blairites and Brownites end old feuds and belatedly realise they were on the same side all along, saying they must reach out to the soft left and prise collaborators from Mr Corbyn’s grip. There is tension between moderates who agreed to serve in his frontbench team and refusniks who could not stomach it.

Moderates speak of “life after Corbyn” but have little idea how to get there, with no organisation or leader-in-waiting. Their best hope is that My Corbyn will self-destruct, and that the army of 180,000 new party members turns against him. But it is dawning on his critics that it will be very difficult to oust him before 2020.

Corbynistas circle the wagons. They plan to change Labour’s rulebook to make it much harder for his critics to oust him. Left-wing MPs respond to the Shadow Cabinet sniping by calling for a reshuffle to install more true believers in the top team. They berate people like me for labelling Mr Corbyn’s opponents “moderates”, saying the critics should be called “rebels”, as the left were styled before winning power.

We can hardly blame Team Corbyn for bolstering his position. But its obsession with the enemy within means that policy decisions are put off. The result is confusion, open division and no clear message to voters --not least on defence. To keep the flame of unilateralism alive, Mr Corbyn will allow a free vote when the Government calls a vote on Trident renewal next spring. More mixed messages.

Although Mr Corbyn’s views on defence and foreign affairs are long-standing and principled, I suspect it was his anti-austerity message that appealed most to the many people he inspired during his leadership campaign. With the Tories in turmoil over tax credits, Labour needs to move on from its damaging internal feuding, become an effective and outward-looking opposition and start talking to the voters. As Dave Prentis, general secretary of the Unison union, which backed Mr Corbyn for the party leadership, said: “Labour cannot afford to degenerate into infighting. People will not vote for a divided party, so Labour has got to get its act together.”

At the birth of the New Labour project, the Blairites were also a clique that seized power in the party. They were in tune with Labour MPs and out of step with party members, many of whom walked away. Some returned this year to help bury New Labour. Conversely, under Mr Corbyn the leadership clique is in sync with the members but not the MPs. The crucial difference is that the Blairites were more in tune with the voters.

Team Corbyn insists their man will lead rather than follow public opinion but there is little sign of it yet. “They are interested in how to keep hold of the levers of power in the party, not winning power in the country,” said one Shadow Cabinet member. As even one left-wing MP admitted: “It is time to lower the drawbridge.”