Meet the magical Labour second referendum pledge making it easier for May to get a Brexit deal through

If you are wearing a hat – and let’s face it you’re not, because hardly anyone wears a hat, other than Jeremy Corbyn out on a cold day attending a Make Hizbollah Great Again rally – you would take it off and gesture approvingly in the direction of the Tiggers. In under a week the actions of the group of MPs that walked out on Labour have changed the Westminster weather. Their decision to quit has applied pressure to Corbyn and his associates, who are already having to shift on Brexit.

In a bid to persuade other Labour MPs standing on the edge of revolt and resignation, threatening to turn a breakaway into a full split, Corbyn has been forced to promise a referendum rerun, sort of.

Before the People’s Vote crowd perform a europhile victory dance – break out the magnums of Bollinger, quails’ eggs all round, everyone back to Roland Rudd’s house to watch the Krzysztof Kieślowski season on the Curzon cinema home-streaming service – it is worth examining the small print.

On closer inspection, this Corbyn move is revealed to be an obvious scam. It has the look of one of those magnificently ingenious operations organised by Corbyn’s closest and most Stalinist advisors in which they perform – in the phrase of my colleague Philip Collins – an exercise designed to appear meaningful. And it’s not.

The Labour leadership is committing to holding a referendum only after it has negotiated a magical new deal, involving a magical version of a customs union that has no basis in recorded history. But Labour is not leading the negotiations, because it did not win the last general election. There is also no evidence that there is a majority for a referendum rerun in the House of Commons. Plenty of Labour  MPs are opposed. Sufficient MPs seem aware of the risks inherent in such a brazen act. Announcing to the country that three years after the voters chose to leave the European Union they must vote again to get it right this time is a lunatic course of action risking the social fabric of the nation.

The aim of Team Corbyn is obvious. Corbyn and his closest aides are Brexiteers leading a party that is heavily anti-Brexit, with the added complication that around a third of Labour voters voted to leave the EU. The bitterness among aggrieved activists and engaged voters will last for years. Corbyn and the far left leadership need to have something soothing to say. This way they can say they did offer a second referendum, eventually. It was an offer made too late and ringed with qualifications and hedged with caveats, but they tried. The terrible Tories blocked it, and so on, repeat to fade for half a decade and more.

This development underlines that May has had a pretty good 24 hours or so on Brexit. There seems to be a slight change in the mood on the EU side, and talks on tweaks are ongoing in Brussels.

Even though Corbyn’s pledge is a scam, it could help Theresa May get a version of her deal through because it adds to the uncertainty, if even more uncertainty is conceivable. It should help those Tory MPs with their brains switched on see that the imperfect May deal is at least a known quantity and it involves leaving the institutions of the EU soon. Kill the deal and a long delay could be imposed, with the referendum rerun monstrosity thrown in, or an accidental general election. A few Tories appear to seek such an election, believing that they would win a huge majority for a “clean Brexit.” What could possibly go wrong? A lot, is the answer.