Philomena Begley is known to her fans as “Ireland’s Queen of Country”. Over the years I have probably seen several hundred live musical performances but one of hers sticks in my mind. Her voice was past its best and she couldn’t hit the high notes anymore. Irish country music is a dreadful genre, on a par with improvised jazz, and this made her vocal struggles all the more painful to endure. Sometimes you have to know when to stop.

Jeremy Corbyn is making Philomena Begley’s mistake. Rather than just accept that Your Party is virtually dead and utterly irrelevant, he is taking to the stage in a seaside hotel and endorsing Aspire and Lutfur Rahman’s election campaign in Tower Hamlets.

“They have my support and my admiration, and I am confident that the people of Tower Hamlets will recognise this when elections come next May.”

He points to some of the decent things that Aspire have done as his reason for throwing his weight behind them and you can’t argue with those. It is what he does not do that is worth commenting on.

Despite being described as “parliamentary leader of ‘Your Party” he has nothing to say about Your Party locally. He does not explain why, if Aspire is so in line with his politics, it hasn’t merged with his organisation.

Shortly after Aspire’s press release was issued The Guardian ran a story which was gifted to them by some of Corbyn’s bag carriers. It looks like he is freelancing, hence the references to “party insiders”, “one Your Party source”, “party figures”, “a source” etc. What you don’t get is a suggestion that the organisation’s leadership met, had a vote and agreed to do something. It is the lowest form of the bureaucratic shenanigans which are now an essential feature of late period Corbynism.

One of Corbyn’s coterie said “we’re focusing on where we are strongest, places where community independent groups have real roots and real prospects.” That is the Galloway model. It is not how you build an internationalist, radical party which has ambitions to represent the entire working class. That is what the 800 000 people who indicated some level of support for Your Party were interested in. Instead, Corbyn is telling his supporters that they should support hyper local outfits with no structure and no national perspective.

I saw Philomena Begley in the mid 1980s. She was impervious to everything that happened musically after she heard her first Tammy Wynette album. Corbyn is her political equivalent. A new left, many of its younger members originally inspired by him, has emerged. They are internationalist, outward looking and see themselves as part of a national movement. They will correctly see his endorsement of these personality driven local election machines as another sign he’s making himself irrelevant.