We will have to assume that the ongoing secret process to assemble Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s new party has similarities to how sausages are made. You might enjoy the end result but you don’t want to see how it is done, and I claim no more insight to the business than anyone else.

But when has lack of definite knowledge ever prevented anyone sharing a scarily plausible second hand account?

Three different sources of various degrees of reliability are saying much the same thing about how the mayor of Tower Hamlets has been involved in discussions to set the thing up. One little bird’s version has it that shortly after its launch Rahman and his councillors will join as a bloc. This would provide the new party with a moderately leftish council.

You will have to go some distance to find a more fervent adherent of the theory of splits and fusions than me, apart from Nigel Farage who is very successfully implementing it. This is the idea that new mass organisations are not created by recruiting people in two and threes, rather that groups of people leave a pre-existing organisation and find like minded souls who join them. The pre-Stalinist Communist Parties are the best examples.

Now whatever else you can call Lutfur Rahman and his group of councillors who get elected under the Aspire label, it is most definitely not a party in any meaningful sense of the word. It does not have a website, anything resembling a programme, any discernible way of joining it, no sign of a membership structure or conference. Outsiders generally have the impression that its councillors are selected through an opaque system of patronage, and it is said that having gone to school with the mayor is a big plus. There are very credible reports that patronage is also a factor in job appointments, but that is another story.

Of course, Aspire is not unique in patronage being a way to plum jobs. Several Labour hopefuls invited me for cups of tea so they could explain how they had been youthful radicals decades previously, were very hard working and hoped they could rely on my vote in councillor selection processes. Quite how they got the phone numbers of people they were barely on nodding terms with is a mystery of data protection beyond my comprehension. The lefties were never given the same help.

The last reported figure for the number of people signing up for the new party is in the region of twenty gazillion and that is a very positive development. Less positive is a hideous bureaucratic lash up agreed beforehand without the active consent and involvement of people who live in the borough affected.

Two very different political cultures will be thrown together. The new party people will have experience in unions and political organisations in which policy is discussed, positions debated and officials, with various levels of success, are held accountable. Even the most useless Labour MPs have to report back to the members in person from time to time. I have seen it happen. They will be combined with another section of the membership, especially councillors and a mayor, who have managed very well without these democratic encumbrances.

The last time an insurgent political force achieved any degree of success in Tower Hamlets it fell apart because the two major components didn’t have a common political method or any desire to build a structure that was much more than a micro bureaucracy making an alliance with people who could deliver votes. Fingers crossed that history doesn’t repeat itself.

Of course, it could be that my little bird is mistaken. It hasn’t actually been in the sausage factory.