The Supreme Court verdict saved the Labour Party conference from itself

A fully shameless four days were rescued at the last, with the un-shocking news that even more shameless parties are out there

As bits of blinding good fortune go, the Supreme Court verdict turned up at the Labour Party conference in much the same way as the Harrison “lesser watch” appeared in Derek and Rodney Trotter’s garage.

Even now, when one considers Jeremy Corbyn’s outrageous luck, it is hard not to see him exultantly punching the roof of a Robin Reliant van.

It was a deus ex machina for the ages. Not a single subplot was left unresolved. It’s not merely that it allowed him to take to the stage in triumph not once, but twice, at the premature end of a 72 hour rolling clusterf**k.

There was also the fact that the untimely de-prorogation of parliament allowed him to bump Tom Watson off the conference schedule entirely. Four days previously, he’d tried and failed to chuck him out the shadow cabinet. This would have to do. Revenge is the dish that’s meant to be best served cold. Blatant spite makes for a decent gazpacho too, it turns out.

A word on “democracy” while we’re here. That is a word that takes a lot of abuse all round the world, from the Korean peninsula to the Congo basin, but the Labour Party’s treatment of it over four mindbending days has been, well, unique.

On the radio on Tuesday morning, we would learn that Diane Abbott and Rebecca Long-Bailey had voted to have Tom Watson slung from the shadow cabinet because it was important to allow the party’s NEC to “debate the subject”. “I don’t want to stifle democracy,” Ms Long-Bailey said.

I mean, yeah. The Labour Party members directly elected Tom Watson as their deputy leader. As if abolishing his position wasn’t already shameless enough, here we were, being told to believe it was all about not stifling democracy.

Jeremy Corbyn is still maintaining he can, as prime minister, lead the country through a second referendum on Brexit without expressing an opinion on the matter himself. That’s the Labour Party’s actual policy now, adopted via a show of hands in the conference hall, in which the verdict of the person whose job it was to actually count the hands was overruled by the general secretary of the party.

Still, it was, in its way, nice to see the debate narrowed again, even if it was by force. It was widened to such devastating effect in 2015 that the nation has never really recovered.

As Corbyn wandered on to the stage, the rapturous masses were treated to a pre-roll video of his unlikely leadership election victory, all the way back, several hundred thousand lifetimes and a mere four years ago.

Indeed, perhaps the most revealing moment of the entire conference was during John McDonnell’s speech, when he referred to Mr Corbyn having “accidentally” become leader of the Labour Party.

Add this to David Cameron “accidentally” taking his country out the EU and you have a pretty solid title for the eventual 180-part tragi-farce docudrama of the times in which we live. Britain: The Accidental Years.

So many and varied have been the accidents since that, in a room full of people capable of registering even a blip on the self-awareness scale, it might theoretically have been possible to wonder whether this moment and the rolling thermonuclear s**tshow that have followed it are related.

But now was not the time for such concerns. They were on their feet. The Messiah stood before them. They punched their fists in his direction, hundreds of them, and shouted “Johnson Out! Johnson Out! Johnson Out!” Their love for the man cannot be questioned, but it was an excessive request all the same. Mercifully, Corbyn did not oblige.

It was the usual stuff. Vote for me and my superior moral virtue. “Boris Johnson and his wealthy friends are not just on the side of the establishment. They are the establishment.”

Three days previously, Labour made the abolition of private schools formal party policy. The momentum from the policy had come, literally, from Momentum, who had made much of its passing through its vast social media channels.

It could make for awkward scenes at the next Highgate School reunion if Momentum founder Jon Lansman decided to attend. But then, it’s not hypocritical to have been to a private school and be in favour of their abolition. It’s possible to believe in fairness while simultaneously being the beneficiary of unfairness.

It’s just that, well, the whole sort of narrative around it. The whole thing about talentless people, failing upwards in life in to positions of power and influence far beyond their abilities. Jeremy Corbyn, to take just one example, recently did not know the difference between a hedge fund and a loan shark, and nevertheless could well be prime minister by the end of the year.

Can you really be sure that you’re one of the statistical outliers here? If you’re having doubts about whether private school people get where they get on merit, can you really be sure you’re not having doubts about yourself? Not on this evidence.

Events in London caused the speech to be hastily rewritten. In such circumstances, Corbyn did well to deviate from the script handed out just moments before and, in thanking his wife, also managing to turn it into a dig at the media.

That’s been a theme of Labour Conference 2019. Dawn Butler thinks there is a “MSM conspiracy” not to cover the story of Boris Johnson’s curious relationship with a businesswoman who’s received thousands of pounds in public money while he was mayor and whose Shoreditch flat he would – reportedly – sometimes pop to on quiet afternoons in the working week.

How the conspiracy fits in to the story being the result of an investigation by the Murdoch-owned Sunday Times was not made clear.

Corbyn himself made a little viral video of himself on Sunday afternoon, brazenly claiming that Andrew Marr’s failure to ask Dominic Raab about the allegations was because “that is what the establishment do. They close ranks”.

It could be that, Jeremy. Could also be that there were mere hours between the story breaking and the Marr Show starting, and BBC never repeat allegations they’ve not stood up themselves. (The morning after the Snowden files were published by the Guardian in 2013, they didn’t even get a mention on the Today programme.)

Then there was Len McCluskey, pointing his finger in the face of Sky News’s Beth Rigby, and telling her to “stop telling lies, you should be ashamed of yourself”, as she told the on-the-record, verbatim truth to him about what Jon Lansman had said the day before.

This litany of shameful stuff might actually have shamed them, had the Supreme Court not rescued them by heaping yet greater shame upon their top political rival.

You don’t even need to have seen some of the acts done in its name over this very long weekend in Brighton to know that democracy is a blunt instrument. There’s an election coming. The people, ultimately, can only play the cards they’re dealt. The public are going to have to vote for someone.

There were some big policies there, too. A carbon-neutral economy by 2030, entailing nothing short of the complete rebuilding of the economy - gig news on a different day. People will like the sound of it. If they do it, it will dwarf anything that the not-un-green Barack Obama managed to achieve in two full terms. Not that one should be overly sceptical of course.

The prospect of a Eurosceptic of a three decades’ standing, hoovering up the votes of Remainers over the promise of a second referendum when he personally did so much to sabotage the first, will not seem entirely real until it’s happened. It’ll be too late then, of course.

Britain: The Accidental Years might just be about to move up a gear.