Every Labour member should celebrate Jeremy Corbyn’s crushing victory on Saturday, no matter which way they voted.

By increasing his mandate to 62 per cent, as YouGov predicted perfectly, Corbyn has put to bed the debate about who should lead the party into the next general election — making him “politically bomb-proof,” according to the BBC.

Any other result would’ve been a disaster. Despite promising to unify Labour, a win for Owen “who?” Smith only offered an escalation of its damaging civil war.

The draconian purge of Corbynistas, in which thousands of members — including me — were disenfranchised on trumped-up abuse and disloyalty charges, would’ve robbed a Smith leadership of any legitimacy before it began.

And even a narrow Corbyn win would only have encouraged his enemies to step up their sniping and sabotage.

Instead, the great survivor is stronger than ever, leading many “centre-left” Labour MPs to wonder why they went to war in the first place.

Indeed, why launch a poisonous and pointless challenge at a time of national political crisis, one week after their colleague had been gunned down in the street by an alleged far-right terrorist?

The referendum result gave Blairites the perfect pretext for their long-planned coup, coincidentally letting the Tories completely off the hook.

By blaming Brexit on Corbyn instead of Boris Johnson or David Cameron, they did incalculable damage to the Labour brand — all part of their master plan to prevent it becoming a mass movement.

And the centre-left was soon swept up in the whole sordid affair, “seduced by sinister forces” to quote Unite leader Len McCluskey.

By co-ordinating their resignations for maximum effect, the shadow cabinet thought they could humiliate Corbyn into throwing in the towel.

When that didn’t work, the party machine tried to stitch-up the leadership election, but first it banned all local meetings — democratic martial law depriving the rank and file any say in what was about to happen.

General secretary Iain McNicol did his best to bully the party’s ruling body into denying Corbyn the right to automatically defend his title.

Helped by a whole heap of legal advice, Corbyn defeated this dirty trick at a crunch meeting, but McNicol still managed to impose a six-month membership retrospective freeze date — unprecedented in party history — after Jez had left the room.

And it was McNicol who later led the appeal against the High Court decision to give new members back their vote.

Re-disenfranchising them wasn’t enough — McNicol wanted to see the five brave members behind the crowd-funded case made bankrupt by paying the party’s legal fees.

Fortunately, almost £100,000 flooded in from supporters within a few hours of the court ruling, easily covering the costs.

Like last year, McNicol has used the party’s compliance unit to stop as many Corbynistas from voting as possible, trawling their social media for Green retweets and words like “traitor.”

But this summer’s contest has seen the purge taken to a whole new level, with massive numbers of members — we don’t know how many yet — suspended and even expelled from the party for the flimsiest of reasons.

And at the bottom of every purge letter is McNicol’s signature. As boss, the buck stops with him.

My own letter is similar to countless others I’ve read on Twitter.

McNicol warns me that members “must conduct themselves in a calm and polite manner and be respectful to each other at all times” — a bit rich given the public abuse Corbyn has suffered from his own MPs.

It’s especially insulting for him to personally suspend me straight away — without any hearing until after the election — because of “the urgency to protect the party’s reputation.”

Judging from the number of suspended members who say they’ll never come back to Labour after their mistreatment, it’s McNicol and his fellow witch-hunters who have really brought the party into disrepute.

And this is the same man who claimed four years ago: “As long as I am general secretary, a fixing culture will not be tolerated,” adding that he’d ensure “the party understands its role in internal elections and administrates them fairly, never interfering in them.”

Corbyn says he wants to “wipe the slate clean” in the interests of party unity — and his supporters would be wise to forgive their fellow “Labour family” members for foolishly following the coup plotters.

But what about those of us who have been thrown out for simply supporting Corbyn — will we have our slates wiped clean, too?

The centrists must also compromise, which means an end to indulging the right wing’s obsession with regime change.

Corbyn has won fair and square, twice, and his critics need to start showing him some serious respect.

The party machine can’t carry on undermining Corbyn by “working to rule” — but there should be no retribution or redundancies, even at compliance. Staff were only obeying McNicol’s orders.

Instead, additional roles should be created throughout the organisation, filled by a new generation loyal to the leader whose primary job is changing a culture of despair.

But an apology won’t be enough for members who saw their votes cynically stolen by McNicol.

We want justice — and as the popular Corbyn-themed meme points out: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”

Or to put it another way, it’s time to cut off the head of the snake.

When members can quote the Red Flag again without fear of reprisals, the public might finally believe Labour has truly changed.

Until then, people are right to wonder just how much the party bureaucracy really cares about democracy.

Most members will never trust McNicol again, in any case, making him quite unfit for purpose.

And if the left must learn to turn the other cheek, its “loyal opposition” within Labour should stop propping up this lame duck. That’s just the price they have to pay for unity — and for us all to put the purge behind us.

Chat to Charley on Twitter: @charleyallan