HOW THEY PLOTTED TO GET RID OF CORBYN

EVEN on the day Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the UK’s Labour Party, a cabal of senior MPs, petrified for their party’s future, began secretly plotting to overthrow him.

Despite him winning the biggest mandate of any modern Labour leader – 59.5% of the 422,664 votes cast – those on the Blairite Right feared he was unelectable as prime minister, and, worse, risked destroying the party.

In fact, only 14 of Labour’s 232 MPs had voted for Mr Corbyn. This made it almost impossible to command the support of the parliamentary party.

The task became even more difficult when some of the biggest hitters in his shadow cabinet immediately resigned – including the shadow health minister Jamie Reed, who announced his resignation during Mr Corbyn’s acceptance speech in September 2015.

These resignations lit a fuse which has fizzled for months and finally exploded yesterday.

‘Unity is our watchword,’ said Mr Corbyn at the start of his leadership. But his own parliamentary career had been marked by disloyalty – he’d voted against his leadership 537 times since 1997.

How on Earth could such a serial traitor command loyalty himself?

The size of Mr Corbyn’s mandate, however, meant his enemies had to bide their time. Cleverly, they reasoned that if they gave him enough rope, he would eventually hang himself.

Since his election last year, there have been several crises.

First, there was his rambling Commons speech on whether Britain should join air strikes against Isis in Syria.

He was immediately rebuked by shadow cabinet colleague Hilary Benn, who closed the debate with a passionate speech that went directly against Corbyn’s line of argument.

Few had witnessed a party leader so publicly opposed in parliament by such a prominent member of their shadow cabinet.

The fact is that Mr Benn knew Mr Corbyn’s authority was so weak that the party leader didn’t have the courage to sack him.

Although Mr Benn pledged future loyalty, the dagger was only put back in its sheath until a more appropriate time. It came on Saturday night, when the son of Corbyn’s great mentor, Tony Benn, savaged him again.

The pressure against the leader had been building for months. Labour had suffered calamitous results in May’s council elections. It had also trailed third behind the Tories in the Scottish Parliament, where it once ruled supreme.

Although Sadiq Khan won a decisive victory for Labour in the London mayoral contest, he unsubtly distanced himself from Mr Corbyn.

But despite being the first opposition leader to lose English council seats for 30 years, Corbyn survived again.

Another potential crisis had happened earlier, back in December, when plotters had smelt blood in the run-up to the Oldham West and Royton by-election in December.

Although Labour held the seat with a big share of the vote, Mr Corbyn’s enemies said this was only due to the candidate being the popular leader of the local council. Otherwise, voters were abandoning Mr Corbyn in droves. But the assassins still held back. Meanwhile, Mr Corbyn’s personal poll ratings plummeted and his performances at Prime Minister’s Questions became risible.

Conversely, although 30,000 centrist supporters left the party, 100,000 left-wing activists joined – inspired by Mr Corbyn’s opposition to the UK’s Trident missile, even though it is Labour policy to update the nuclear deterrent. This led to deeper divisions. A beleaguered Mr Corbyn attempted to bolster his powerbase by transferring policy-making to activists and trying to sideline dissident MPs.

He told a meeting of his MPs: ‘The back-biting, public attacks and constant sniping have to stop.’

And veteran left-winger Ronnie Campbell told the meeting ‘socalled Blairites’ were planning a coup.

He said: ‘If they think they can get rid of Jeremy Corbyn, get someone in, and win the next election they are living in cloud-cuckoo land . . . They’ve got as much chance as the man on the moon.’

This enraged the anti-Corbyn group further, and they sought some way of removing him before the Labour conference in September, when the Corbynistas are expected to entrench their power with more policy-making responsibilities passed from MPs to grassroots activists.

Mr Corbyn was also believed to be planning to change rules so that in a leadership election, the incumbent’s name would automatically go forward without the need for nominations from 20% of the parliamentary party – a requirement for other candidates.

All that, though, is now history. Mr Corbyn’s catastrophic failure to get Labour’s traditional working class and its northern heartlands to vote Remain in the EU referendum has delivered his would-be assassins their best chance.

First to wield the knife was Margaret Hodge, a former minister under Tony Blair. She announced within hours of the Brexit result that she would table a no-confidence motion at today’s parliamentary Labour Party meeting.

CUE the moment for Hilary Benn to act. Swiftly followed by Tristram Hunt, who said: ‘We need new leadership – the next few days will decide whether Labour is serious about winning back our lost voters.’

Suddenly, knives were being sharpened everywhere.

Mr Benn had planned to announce his resignation after today’s shadow cabinet meeting. But in a pre-emptive strike, Corbyn sacked him over the phone in the early hours yesterday.

Then, at 5.30am, researchers from BBC1’s The Andrew Marr Show invited Mr Benn to be a guest on the programme.

The respected shadow foreign secretary’s bold rebellion was the signal to fellow shadow cabinet members to follow suit.

Of course, the coup may fail. In which case, the rebels will have to start all over again. But one thing is for sure: they won’t rest until Jeremy Corbyn quits.