You memory seems to be letting you down, John. Ever since Corbyn was elected leader, the senior right-wing members of the party - let's call them the Yvette Cooper faction - not only refused to work with him, turning down shadow cabinet posts, etc., but routinely briefed against him. A number of them gleefully jumped on the utterly bogus "Corbyn is antisemitic" bandwagon. They didn't give a sod about the fact that they were helping to wreck future election prospects. They were ideologues with one-track minds, with the aim of purging the party of lefties. Jeremy did much better than expected in 2017, lest you forget. But those right-wingers fought the war of attrition for the next two years, supported by the right-wing press, leading to the disaster of 2019. That is exactly what they wanted. So who really were the splitters? They did all that while half a million people, nearly all lefties, had joined the party. Wow. And in the first few weeks of leading the party, Starmer "purged" the party of Corbyn on spurious grounds and he sacked Becky Long-Bailey, ten times the person he is, also on spurious grounds. Two inconvenient lefties out of the way...

I've been a trade unionist for fifty years. Going right back to the early seventies, my union, The NUT, was riven by two factions, what you might now call the centre left and the hard left. The constant wail of the former was that the union "needed unity," which, to them, meant purging the party of lefties (I received two warning letters from the General Secretary, Fred Jarvis, myself). Those who regard themselves as mainstream in the party who "call for unity" always have that agenda. We're right, the lefties are wrong, let's fight the lefties whatever it takes. Tar and feather them, demonise them, undermine them at every turn, get the Mail on your side. I've seen it time and time again. 'Twas ever thus, and I hear an echo of that in your post.

One of the hardest of the hard lefties in east London was my friend Blair Peach. He was murdered by a policeman in 1979. He also was warned by the union establishment, many times. These days, the union gives an annual Blair Peach award to the teacher who has done the most to promote racial harmony. Funny, that.