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Labour commits hara-kiri by copying Tories' playbook on infighting

<span>Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA</span>
Photograph: Victoria Jones/PA

Classic Dom. He’s got the Labour party just where he wants it. Taking a leaf out of the Conservative party playbook. The Tories have spent the last few years fighting over Europe and conducting drive-by shootings on each other. And the lesson that Labour appears to have taken from this is that if it wants to be successful at the next election and form the next government, then it has to behave in much the same way.

There were so many things that Labour could have been talking about on the opening two days of its party conference. Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament. The imminent supreme court judgment that could lead to a recall. The Incredible Sulk’s alleged cavalier attitude to public money – hell it was only a few grand – while London mayor. The lack of any progress towards a Brexit deal. The Non-Papers that happened to contain Non-Ideas.

Labour could even have used the time to make sure that some of its policies – free prescription charges and reversing cuts to legal aid – received a proper hearing. Instead it chose to settle some old scores by trying to remove Tom Watson as deputy leader in case he accidentally wound up in charge if Jeremy Corbyn stepped down and then having to fend off accusations of incompetence and dogmatism in the leader’s office after the resignation of Andrew Fisher, who will step down as Corbyn’s main policy adviser before the end of the year. Why make yourself look like a party fit for government, when you can have so much more fun committing hara-kiri?

Corbyn tends to avoid giving broadcast interviews these days. Partly because he doesn’t trust the media but mainly because he’s not very good at them. But for the Sunday of a party conference he always makes an exception. Even if he has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the studio. Maybe it was the timing – he’d forgotten the programme had been moved forward an hour since his last appearance – but the Labour leader couldn’t have looked less like a man happy to shoot the breeze and exchange ideas if he’d tried. If not peevish, then he was certainly defensive. This was clearly a chore rather than a chance to shine.

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Sure he knew Watson. They were great friends. They had seen each other at least twice in the past couple of years. Corbyn would have liked it to have been more often, but Tom did tend to get boring and go on and on about his diet. And he’d been as amazed as anyone that one of his closest political allies had chosen to go for Tom but even if he had known, he would just have assumed it was the normal everyday trash talk in his office. Didn’t every party leader have a list of contract killings on their wall? As a joke, obvs! But he’d gone out of his way to defuse the situation by suggesting he have two deputies. Who could resist the opportunity for even more fallouts?

As for Fisher, he’d just been a bit overwrought. Things had got on top of him a bit. He needed a break. It was completely normal for someone who had written the highly regarded 2017 manifesto to announce his resignation when it might be only months before another election. And Brexit was just about sorted. He’d negotiate a new deal with the EU and then have another referendum in which he might or might not support one side or the other. It all depended on what the members decided but he was sure the conference agenda could be stitched up in advance. Anything to keep people guessing.

A sense of solidarity was also markedly lacking in a lunchtime fringe meeting where the Unite leader, Len McCluskey, was insisting that Labour was a party of unity and healing. It was just that some of the healing meant eliminating anyone with a different opinion to him. Cruel to be kind. Extreme unction. Any Labour frontbencher who didn’t agree with whatever he happened to believe on any given day would have to be sacked.

In which case there were plenty of volunteers on view. Watson had emerged positively chipper from his near-death experience – it’s come to something when old Labour bods can’t organise a decent purge – and had been welcomed with loud cheers at another fringe meeting where he had once again contradicted the moving target of Labour’s Brexit policy. As had Emily Thornberry. And Clive Lewis. At a time when Labour is committed to stamping out the gig economy, it’s curious to find so many of its MPs choosing to go freelance.