Len McCluskey is threatening Labour with electoral defeat. He is, after all, the world expert on the subject

Brexit has made something of a cult hero of the sheriff from Blazing Saddles who holds a gun to his own head and threatens to shoot himself if the bad guys don’t stop at once.

This has been Britain’s negotiating position for four and a half miserable years, and while it might have had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the European Union, it does appear to have provided inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

And that place would be Len McCluskey, who has wasted no time at all in appearing to threaten Keir Starmer. If Jeremy Corbyn’s suspension isn’t lifted, McCluskey has warned, it will cost Labour the next election.

Starmer is yet to respond directly, though we are reminded of the time lawyers for TV wardrobe monitors Trinny and Susannah wrote to Viz magazine and demanded they stop taking the piss out of their clients. A letter which got the reply, “We are too busy laughing to comment.”

It is hard to imagine what an election might look like for Labour were McCluskey to try and lose it for them. But we know very well indeed what it looks like when he tries to win one, and it is impossible, frankly, to see how the former could be any worse.

Already, the Corbyn cultists are talking of the urgent need for party unity, but there is no such need at all. The important thing to understand is that the cult of Corbyn has nothing to offer. It is electorally, morally and politically worthless.

It has also been generous enough, through its sheer political ineptitude, to make Starmer’s life gloriously easy for him. It was very much Corbyn’s free choice to respond to the antisemitism report by downplaying the problem, and blaming it on the media.

Before Corbyn’s absurd statement, Starmer was potentially in a difficult place, politically. He had not quit the Labour Party, as others had done. He hadn’t refused to serve in Corbyn’s team, as others had done. He had effectively gone along with it all. It was Corbyn’s decision to make it impossible for the party not to suspend him. He has detoxified Starmer. The toxin being himself.

There is already talk that a divided party cannot win, but there’s no real evidence to suggest that’s true. The Labour Party’s struggles with the hard left have gone on for decades, and are often mischaracterised as a civil war. It is not a civil war. The sides are not evenly matched enough for it to be described thus. The hard left is a preposterous faction that has had its hour in the sun and been found unimaginably wanting. Corbyn only ever drew his authority from the “mass membership” and earlier this year that mass membership overwhelmingly declined to vote for the continuity Corbyn candidate.

Even to indulge the notion that there is a legitimate struggle for the party’s soul, it should be overwhelmingly obvious to see that it is principally a battle between winners and losers. When the hard left wins, Labour loses. Sometimes, at least, it wins with a little style. At least Michael Foot and Tony Benn were intellectual giants, leaders of men. Corbyn was the biggest and grandest loser of them all. A man with precisely nothing to offer. A national embarrassment whose name need never be heard again.

Labour is under new leadership and that leadership should understand that at this point, party unity doesn’t matter. Threatening to shoot themselves is all they’ve got left. Just let them get on with it.