Theresa May’s Tories are such a disaster that we almost forgot how incompetent Corbyn is – until now

Corbyn knows that his front bench has outlined at least ten different models for Brexit, he personally being responsible for at least three of them

With the DUP and Conservative deal appearing on the brink of collapse, an imminent general election cannot be ruled out, which would explain why Jeremy Corbyn has gone straight into expectation-lowering mode.

Given this first phase of election planning tends to require around nineteen months, he knows there is no time to lose.

Marked by general incompetence, a number of lengthy cabinet reshuffles and fatal undermining of core party policy, its function is to allow massive electoral defeat to the worst Prime Minister in living memory to be re-badged and sold on as victory.

So when, at Prime Minister’s questions the Labour leader returned to the stuttering, uncertain, open goal-missing Jeremy Corbyn of days not very long gone by, it absolutely should not be interpreted as him being even more hopelessly out of position on Brexit than Theresa May, but rather the start of the long march to Number 10.

Some background. On Monday Theresa May had to come back from Brussels having not announced the deal she went there to announce, and not because anyone in Brussels had stopped her, but because the small, Northern Irish party she has already given £1.5bn to told her she couldn’t.

The small, Northern Irish party that campaigned for Brexit even when the Conservative and Unionist Prime Minister, David Cameron, campaigned against it. Now it appears to want a hard Brexit but won’t tolerate a hard border with the republic of Ireland.

This position can be best explained as the Willy Wonka’s everlasting gobstopper of having one’s cake and eating it. The more cake the DUP consume, the larger its collection of cake becomes, right up to the point where it can simultaneously feature in “Too Fat To Leave The House” style documentaries and Britain’s Biggest Hoarders.

These are the open goals that, since June, Jeremy Corbyn has slotted with great ease. But they have been on altogether more straightforward shambles, like universal credit.

He did his best to summon righteous anger over the “one and a half billion reasons why she shouldn’t haven’t forgotten” to tell the DUP the details of her Brussels plans, but he sat down defeated before the answer had even begun, and not merely because he had inadvertently phrased his question so as to make no sense.

He knows his own party is even more hopelessly without a credible plan for Brexit, even more hopelessly contorted. He knows his front bench has outlined at least ten different models for Brexit, he personally being responsible for at least three of them. He may also be aware that he and his Shadow Chancellor are two of Westminster’s most dedicated eurosceptics of three decades standing, who lead a party for whom leaving the European Union is an unprecedented horror.

Indeed, it is worth remembering that there was a point, at about half past one in the morning on 9 June when the precise arithmetic of the House of Commons moved briefly to a point at which Jeremy Corbyn became favourite to be the next Prime Minister.

There were even murmurings that to Sinn Fein might take their seats at Westminster, for the first time in their history, and mumble allegiance to the Queen to make it happen.

It is fair to imagine, in such a situation, Sinn Fein’s demands on Labour’s apparently IRA sympathising leader being rather more than some cash for broadband upgrades. They might, in fact, have born some similarity to their central demand of around a hundred years, namely the "liberation" of Northern Ireland itself.

Still, Corbyn need not worry. It’s Theresa May’s Conservatives. There’ll be another disaster along soon enough, and Brexit can go back under the radar where it’s safe. It can’t last forever though. At some point, be it at Prime Minister’s Questions or elsewhere, it will become overwhelmingly clear he has the least answers of all.