A group of centrist and right-wing MPs and journalists conspire together to smear ‘the left’ and Jeremy Corbyn as antisemitic.

The conspiracy is successful. A democratically elected Labour MP, Chris Williamson, is suspended and can’t fight his seat as an MP. Many Labour activists and members are smeared; some are suspended, some expelled, some leave of their own accord.

Libel suits are brought and people are ruined, lose their jobs, their careers. Their lives are turned upside down. The Labour party itself is smeared, and loses two elections partly as a result of it, leading directly to the calamity of the Johnson/Cummings administration.

I, like many others, have watched in horror as this conspiracy against the truth grew, metastasising from individual complaints into a tsunami of invective, hate, bigotry and falsehood. A vicious, brutal war, fought by media and MPs.

The conspiracy against truth has one purpose only, to delegitimise the left, to create such a stench around them that they would forever be defined by it, the words ‘Labour’ and ‘antisemitism’ coupled together in a thousand commentary pieces and broadcast interviews.

The desired result is obtained, the Corbyn-led Labour party is denied government, and the conspiracy starts to fold itself away again. The GnasherJew twitter account is decommissioned, the libel suit against barrister Jane Heybroek is withdrawn.

John Ware’s ‘Panorama: Is Labour Antisemitic?’ BBC programme doesn’t win a BAFTA, and Jeremy Corbyn’s Legal Fighting Fund soars up and away within a few days.

So what lessons are to be learned from it all?

1. Conspiracies are real. It’s easy to dismiss talk about ‘conspiracies’ as ‘tin-foil hat’ stuff. But that is to deny reality here: MPs and journalists really did conspire to invent a wholly fraudulent ‘reality’ in which Labour was consumed with Jew-hate from top to bottom.

Obviously that’s false, and equally obviously that perception could not have been achieved without concerted effort by many different players to create it in the minds of the electorate. That’s a decent enough definition of ‘conspiracy’.

2. Many key UK institutions are broken. BBC, Ofcom, EHRC are the obvious casualties, no doubt there are others. Trust in these bodies has collapsed as they've revealed themselves to be complicit, corrupted by the conspiracy. The entirety of the British state stands accused.

3. The Labour party is broken. The conspiracy has broken the Labour party. Starmer’s fumbling efforts to put sticking-plasters over gaping wounds is not working, the left are abandoning the party, polling remains disastrous, and there is no effective opposition now to Johnson.

4. Politics is broken. Media are broken. The country is broken. These are the rubble and ashes the firestorm has left in its wake.

These are significant successes. Whatever Labour does now is measured by its response to the conspiracy. Corbyn supporters are still routinely libelled as antisemites with the party’s blessing. The party has turned on itself and is now busily doing the work its enemies triggered.

The conspiracy against the truth has succeeded, and we all now live with its consequences, which are a hobbled and paralysed Labour party and a government that has nothing whatsoever to fear from it.

The war is over. The war is won.