The collapse of the United Nations peace process in Libya has left European states, not least those on its southern frontier, looking across the sea in trepidation.

With the failure of year-long talks, ending in ignominy with of revelations that UN envoy Bernardino Leon had taken a job with a Gulf state that backs one of the one of the combatants, the country is poised to slip into a black hole. The EU is farcically still congratulating Leon for a job well done.

All this means ISIS will continue to grow on the southern shore of the Mediterranean and there will be no check on the tens of thousands of migrants heading north.

But a solution is at hand, if only Europe’s leaders will grasp it, in the shape of democracy. Libya already has an elected parliament, chosen in UN-supervised elections last year, and now confined to the east of the country, while militia-led rivals of Libya Dawn control the capital.

In the vacuum left by the departure of the stumbling Leon, that parliament, the House of Representatives in Tobruk has begun reaching out with a simple message - work with us and we can fix ISIS and migration.

Tobruk remains Libya’s only elected parliament, and though its original mandate expired last month, it voted itself another year in office, and the international community was content to maintain its international recognition status.

Until now, Tobruk was locked in the UN mediation dance, an attempt by Leon to reconcile the un-reconcilable, by sharing the power between the elected parliament in Tobruk and Libya Dawn militias and their own, unelected, government in Tripoli.

Leon has gone, the email scandal surrounding a job he agreed with Abu Dhabi discrediting not just himself but the UN for allowing it, thus making his successor, German diplomat Martin Kobler, irrelevant.  After the so-called ‘Leongate’, nothing the UN or EU for that matter, says or does in Libya will be believed.

But the Tobruk administration remains in being; by turns chaotic and disorganised, yet with a powerful weapon in its arsenal, through the legitimacy of the elections that created it.

Several court cases in Malta have seen Tobruk regain control of a string of national assets

Britain, taking Europe’s lead on Libya, has so far effectively shunned Tobruk. For a landmark conference in London last month to analyse donor needs, no senior official from Tobruk was invited to speak.  Foreigners lined up to give their opinions, but from the elected government there was no one.

In the void left by the failure of the peace process, Tobruk has begun moves to assert itself. Its international recognition status means it is entitled to Libya’s oil revenues, not its Tripoli rival, and lawyers have started to press the case across Europe. Back in September, Deputy Prime Minister Abdussalam Elbadri told a conference in Valletta that it would be ensuring it controls oil revenues. This month it began circulating documentation giving oil companies the order.

Several court cases in Malta have seen Tobruk regain control of a string of national assets, and it is confident of victory in a much bigger case in London’s high court, the battle over the $60 billion Libya Investment Authority.

These legal moves come in tandem with moves by the ruling cliques in both the Tobruk parliament and its government down the road in Al Bayda to start a positive dialogue with the UK as its preferred honest broker and the rest of Europe.

Tobruk has much to offer, not least on the subject of migration. More than 140,000 made the sea journey from Libya this year, and at least as many can be expected next year. Tobruk offers a way out. It has a more than a dozen naval units, including six fast patrol boats delivered two years ago from Holland, which can add bite to the EU’s anti-migrant naval mission, which is yet to arrest a single smuggler six weeks after being announced. Why don’t the EU invite the Libyan Navy to assist?

Cooperation offers the chance that this navy may go where EU ships are not allowed, inshore, to catch smugglers in the act of deploying their boats. Trust is for now in short supply because the EU force is commanded by an Italian admiral, and Tobruk has as recently as last week, twice accused Italian ships of straying too close to eastern Libyan waters.

Likewise with ISIS, military cooperation will at least halt the spread of the terror group which, having consolidated its murderous hold on Sirte is pushing into the Sirte Basin oil fields.

It is time to reach out to Tobruk, before Libya’s fragmentation becomes total. Removing Britain’s ineffective envoy Jonathan Powell would be a start, the obvious replacement being its former ambassador Dominic Asquith who gave a blistering and even-handed critique of international policy on Libya to London’s foreign affairs committee.

Europe’s help for the elected government must be conditioned on it remaining democratic, and subject to the rule of law, but that help must be offered, before it really is too late.

It is the UK that must assume the role of honest broker not the discredited institutions of the EU and UN.