Amid the fallout from last week’s chaos in the Commons, one question has gone largely unexplored: is Labour out of the woods on Gaza? Despite all efforts to manoeuvre itself into a safer position, the party seems to have only inflamed things further. Its ostensibly successful face-saving amendment to the SNP’s ceasefire motion – and its apparent pressure on the speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, to upturn parliamentary convention – brought about a crisis in the Commons, and has done little to appease angry voters.

The resulting waves of claim and toxic counterclaim are still building: Lee Anderson’s outburst of anti-Muslim rhetoric has led to him being stripped of the Tory whip. No matter how much analysis says otherwise, particularly the sort that treats Westminster as a self-contained theatre of political gamesmanship, Labour’s victory was a pyrrhic one. It was secured in the Commons but lost outside its walls, highlighting an inescapable limitation in the party’s very coding.

Whatever motion Labour ended up ramming through, it came too late. The party’s first position on Gaza, refusing to condemn breaches of international law (or even call them that), and refusing to call for a ceasefire, has made too strong an impression for it to be erased by any new modifications. It was a position that fed into something bigger: into pre-existing reservations and dwindling faith in the party.

For those the party was trying to bring round, the manner in which it prevailed will only act to reinforce its most suspect qualities – calculating, pedantic, authoritarian. Ready to drag parliament into the mire so it could pursue its manic drive to keep control of a party narrative that now exists only in the leadership’s........

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