Labour and the Conservatives are being held hostage by the more insane fringes of their parties – both will have to split

Notions of conspiracy over Brexit and antisemitism risk breaking the Conservative party and Labour, respectively. So what will happen next?

On both the left and the right, British politics appears to be in thrall to the conspiracy theorist – and the grim consequences of obstinacy worthy of Mohamed Al Fayed are clear to see.

The Conservatives and Labour are respectively beset by the ongoing shambles of Brexit and antisemitism.

In the past week, Jeremy Corbyn has apologised twice for his party’s failure to act quick enough to deal with its antisemitism problem. But even Corbyn’s own acknowledgement fails to convince his army of keyboard warriors to accept the problem is there.

To criticise Corbyn, even to write down the words of his own apology, is to have become a “Blairite”, or a Tory, or “Murdoch scum”. Criticise Corbyn’s woeful handling of a shocking scandal that has been 30 years or more in the making, and your real motivation is simply to bring the Dear Leader down. At this point you have apparently been “exposed” and then the real abuse can begin.

Meanwhile in Brexitland, when the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, says the possibility of a horrendous no-deal Brexit is substantially up, it is all just “Project Fear 2”. There are howls of outrage. The Bank is not worth listening to. We’ve heard it all before. Never mind that by its own forecasts, as global growth has surged in the past two years and left Britain behind, the national coffers are £40bn behind where they might otherwise have been. (Just imagine a Labour government doing that, to settle its own internal scores, to stretch its private Europe neurosis on to the nation. The outrage would be mind-bending.)

And yet on Sunday, when Liam Fox mentions the likelihood of no deal has “risen to 60-40”, the howls of derision are silent. Fox is not a Project Fear merchant. The algorithm must have misfired.

How does either party escape from these absurd positions? Online, the Labour party can barely be described as a zoo: it would be too disrespectful to the chimpanzees. The coordinated #ResignWatson attack on Labour’s deputy leader last night, which incorporates some 50,000 tweets, marks a low-point for Project Corbyn, though it will undoubtedly go lower.

The government is self-immolating. No prime minister has ever been given such an impossible ride, and by contrast no opposition leader has had such an easy one. And yet, here they were, launching waves of vitriolic and deeply personal abuse at Labour’s deputy leader for having the temerity to speak out on antisemitism. He had traduced Corbyn. He is, we learn, a “Blairite”, despite being the chief MP responsible for the toppling of Tony Blair in 2007, and despite personally forcing Blair to publicly name the date he would leave.

Corbyn has bought hundreds of thousands of new people in to the Labour fold. Perhaps we should not be surprised then at the sheer political naivety shown by its members. To think that the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, have no right to relentlessly attack and expose Corbyn’s past and present transgressions on antisemitism. As if the leader of the opposition should just be left alone. Or that their revelations are somehow undermined by their wider political objectives.

Where does it lead? The antisemitism row is merely the symptom of a disease that could yet be terminal for Labour. The party has been taken over by a leader, his acolytes and his following who do not, and have never, shared the founding values and principles of the Labour Party.

The Labour Party does not approach the world from the starting position that the West will be in the wrong. It doesn’t take the opposite side to the country’s historical alliances, even at the current moment, when they could not be more gravely tested. It doesn’t indulge in revisionist history on Stalinism, and pose the question of whether America “can be defeated,” as Seumas Milne has in the Guardian.

It is for this reason that many are whispering about the possibility of a formal split, coming this autumn. A large number of Labour MPs cannot countenance campaigning for Jeremy Corbyn to be prime minister. He shares almost none of their values, never has done and never will.

As for the Conservatives? The EU, in the end, will probably do a deal, at the last minute. That is the way it functions. But the atmosphere in those rarefied moments before it will be so febrile that the usual suspects of Conservatives, the ones traditionally branded traitors on the front of various newspapers, will have to publicly state their intention to vote down a no-deal Brexit.

That is a split too, of a kind. And who knows, it could be then that the long overdue bus finally comes crashing down the middle of British politics. That these two parties that cannot manage their internal divisions are simultaneously set asunder. What happens then? Anyone who tells you they know the answer to that question is not telling you the truth.