Theresa May-style evasion, Trump-esque smears on the media – Corbyn's performance on Marr had it all

The Labour leader only becomes bad-tempered when he knows he’s completely bang to rights. Boy did it show

Even in these wild political times, the annual Jeremy Corbyn set-piece interview retains its status as one of the Grand Slam events, and this year’s was a classic for the ages.

It had it all. The piety, the tetchiness, the May-esque refusal to answer a simple question, the Trump-esque baseless attacks at the media, absolutely all of it.

It is hard to know where to start, really. Last year, at his eve of conference appearance on The Andrew Marr Show, Corbyn discovered it is perhaps unwise to only do this thing once a year. In 20 toe-curling minutes, he found himself having to walk through, piece by agonising piece, a full 12 month’s worth of antisemitism scandals.

Quite remarkably this time, however, he found that he and his party had produced more than enough material to fill Marr’s allotted 25 minutes in just the last 24 hours.

Why had his allies in the party just tried to kick out the deputy leader? Marr wanted to know. Corbyn sighed. He rolled his eyes heavenward. All this was so very far beneath him. He doesn’t get this tetchy that often, maybe only two or three times a year, but unfortunately for him, he only does it when he is absolutely bang to rights. The classic tell.

The move to abolish the position of deputy leader, and thus to defenestrate Tom Watson, was brought by Jon Lansman, the guy who ran Corbyn’s leadership campaign, twice, and it was voted for by two of Corbyn’s most loyal allies, Diane Abbott and Rebecca Long-Bailey, before ultimately failing. But it had nothing to do with Corbyn, oh no, not me guv.

“It wasn’t a move against Tom Watson specifically, it was concerns about the role of deputy leader,” Corbyn told Marr. There is absolutely no one alive who believes this.

Lansman is not a difficult man to spot at Labour Party conference. He wears floral shirts that he buys in job lots (completely true). He himself, when asked, is not bothering to pretend this is untrue.

Ultimately, the backlash against the move was so severe, and so threatened to utterly undermine the entire conference, that Corbyn intervened at the last minute yesterday to kick it into the long grass.

“I proposed a statement to the National Executive Committee”, he told Marr, “that we should have a consultation about having two deputy leaders in the future, which would reflect gender and hopefully ethnic balance within our society”.

This, really, is the tremendous good fortune of having the kind of unimpeachable moral virtue that only Corbyn truly possesses. When you attempt some straightforwardly shabby politics and it backfires, well, there is always the cause of women and ethnic minorities to dig you out of a hole.

Corbyn’s saintliness should never be queried. He has spent all his life fighting against inequality and injustice (it is frankly a miracle that there nevertheless still seems to be so much of it about).

When his acolytes try to sling the deputy leader out of the shadow cabinet but cock it up, it is, naturally, merely about Corbyn doing his little bit for social justice, yet again.

In any event, Corbyn was growing weary of all these Watson questions. He sniffed again. He shook his head. He jutted his head forward like an angry ostrich.

“This conference is actually about policy,” he said, in as patronising a tone as any man can muster when they know they’re so hopelessly in the wrong. “It’s about health, it’s about housing, it’s about education, it’s about environment. That’s why all these people are here.”

Who did Andrew Marr think he was exactly, asking the Labour leader about a blatant attempt to kick out his own deputy?

Still, they did start talking about policy after that, kind of, and that’s when things instantly got much worse.

And that’s because the chap who’s actually responsible for Labour Party policy has resigned, and his resignation letter is on the front page of The Sunday Times, which Marr then read out.

Andrew Fisher, who has spent months coming up with almost all of the policies that will be launched with as much fanfare as possible at this conference, is quitting over a “lack of professionalism, competence and human decency” within Corbyn’s office, and because he has had enough of their “blizzard of lies and excuses”.

This made Corbyn even tetchier than before. He cocked his head. He exhaled hard through his nose. He’d just had a perfectly “convivial cup of coffee” that morning with Fisher and the rest of his team, a claim we must take at face value, while considering how often convivial cups of coffee are drunk between people who have called each other liars on the front of The Sunday Times.

Since the memo became public, most of Corbyn’s online army have been busily calling it all a lie. That the mainstream media had just made it up.

Unfortunately, Corbyn himself confirmed it was real. But not only was it real, this memo in which his own most loyal staff had been called liars and humanly indecent, it was also, apparently, no big deal.

“I would have thought similar memos fly around the BBC pretty well every day Andrew," Corbyn told him. “Even in your own team.”

Marr looked more confused than agitated. It seemed beyond the scope of his comprehension that Corbyn could possibly be being serious. That he could even have said it. It is, after all, as absolutely 100 per cent pure Donald Trump as it gets.

Yes, that’s right Andrew, my policy chief has quit over the lack of human decency in my office, but come on, we all know the mainstream media is the real enemy here. I bet backstage, at ‘The Andrew Marr Show’, they’re all calling each other incompetent liars lacking in human decency. They’re probably even saying it about you Andrew, aren’t they, behind your back? You’re the one that’s lacking in human decency here, and everyone knows it.

All of which means there is barely time to get on to Labour’s Brexit policy. Corbyn is still maintaining, with as straight a face as possible, that his plan is to have a general election, win it, then negotiate a new, better deal with the EU, then have a referendum on it in which he, the actual prime minister by this point, will remain neutral.

For around three minutes, he pointedly refused to answer whether he would back Leave or Remain in his own referendum, a position he genuinely imagines he can maintain through an entire election campaign.

It would, he said, depend on the deal he himself negotiated. He also said it would be possible to get a deal that would leave Britain “better off out of the EU”. (Don’t tell the EU that, because they definitely won’t be offering it.)

Here is the really laughable thing. It’s not merely that he will fight a general election without a Brexit position. It’s not merely that he, as the leader of the Labour Party, is openly stating he’s just happy to go with whatever the party decides, like a hopeless best man on a badly organised stag do.

It’s that he won’t even fight an election on his own ability to get a good deal. The public will be asked to vote for him, on a promise that he’ll go to Brussels and get a deal that may or may not be better than leaving, but don’t ask me because I haven’t negotiated it yet.

That is quite the slogan. “Vote for me, and we’ll see if I’m any good.”

Unfortunately, his policy chief’s own view on that is all over the front pages of the newspapers. Who knows? It is dimly possible that the public might come to the same view.