I can’t state categorically, obviously, that this was the strangest Labour conference in history.

I’ve only been going for the last ten years or so and I’d say each of the last four have left been pretty odd anyway, not least because on one of those occasions the party had just elected Jeremy Corbyn as leader for the first time, while on another they had just done so again after a mass walk-out of shadow ministers over Brexit.

But this year did attempt to set a new bar. Before I’d even started thinking about getting the train down from Manchester, there had been a putsch to try and take out the party’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, in a political ‘drive by’ that took place while he was eating a Chinese at the Sweet Mandarin in the Northern Quarter.

That attempt, at a meeting of Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee from which he was absent, failed by the skin of its teeth but rocked conference before it even started, managing to overshadow - for a couple of days at least - the other major division that was due to play out over Brexit on the conference floor, while also taking attention away from several new policy announcements the party had lined up.

Nevertheless we did learn some things, so here are some of the highlights...and lowlights.

(Image: PA)

Labour wants to eradicate carbon emissions within a decade

One of the key policy consequences of conference was around climate change, in what the party calls its ‘green new deal’.

That will include 37 new wind farms, shadow business secretary Rebecca Long Bailey announced, creating 2,000 jobs in the north west.

It is also pledging to head for net-zero carbon emissions by 2030 - faster than the Liberal Democrats, who are aiming for 2040, or the Tories, who have picked 2050.

The ambitious target was not supported by everyone, however.

During the ‘compositing’ process - essentially when wings of the party sit in a room until the early hours thrashing out a compromise motion to go before members - the GMB union had been forcefully arguing against that target, for two main reasons.

Firstly, the 2030 date was seen as arbitrary, picked simply because it would be faster than either of the party’s main rivals.

Secondly, argued the union, trying to transition thousands if not millions of jobs from industries such as car manufacturing into new, green energy jobs would not be possible in the space of just a decade.

Nevertheless the more ambitious pledge emerged victorious.

Asked on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning about the pledge, including the cost - the Tories having costed their own pledge at £1trn over the next 30 years - Jeremy Corbyn said there was no choice.

“This is a massive global wake-up call,” he said of climate change, “that every country has to respond to.”

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It would also crack down on drug companies

The key new policy in Jeremy Corbyn’s speech related to the cost of drugs.

Telling the story of a little boy called Luis Walker, who has cystic fibrosis but can’t receive the medication he needs because its manufacturer won’t sell it to the NHS at an affordable price, he attacked a pharmaceutical industry ‘puts profits for shareholders before people’s lives’.

“Labour will tackle this,” he said.

“We will redesign the system to serve public health - not private wealth - using compulsory licensing to secure generic versions of patented medicines.

“We’ll tell the drugs companies that if they want public research funding then they’ll have to make their drugs affordable for all. And we will create a new publicly owned generic drugs manufacturer to supply cheaper medicines to our NHS saving our health service money and saving lives.

“We are the party that created the NHS. Only Labour can be trusted with its future.”

He also confirmed that the party would follow the Welsh government’s example by scrapping prescription charges.

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And abolish private schools

A flurry of eye-catching education announcements emerged from shadow secretary of state Angela Rayner, including the scrapping of schools inspectorate Ofsted.

If that wasn’t bold enough, conference also voted to scrap private schools.

A motion passed on Sunday stated that ‘the ongoing existence of private schools is incompatible with Labour’s pledge to promote social justice’, pledging to integrate them into the state sector instead.

This was a big gear change from its previous policy on the issue, which had been around taxation rules.

It also promised to ‘redistribute’ the land and assets of those schools into the public education sector.

However on the BBC this morning Jeremy Corbyn seemed to distance himself from that pledge, insisting the ‘immediate issue’ for the party were it to win power would be to end charitable status for private schools.

Nevertheless both things have been declared party policy and some have pointed out the inherent contradiction in that: either you want to scrap private schools, or you don’t want to scrap them but you do want to reform their tax rules.

The atmosphere was strange

After the failed coup on Friday night, it was unsurprising that things would feel weird.

Labour’s internal divisions had been laid brutally bare, but that was only magnified when delegates voted on Brexit on Monday afternoon (see below), beaming images of warring members out to voters in the wider country as they fought with each other and with the leadership over how to campaign on leaving the EU.

Still, one flashpoint of weirdness was side-stepped on Tuesday when Tom Watson’s speech - which had the potential to quite a spectacle, with some members trying to organise walk-outs in support of the leadership - was cancelled in the wake of the bombshell Supreme Court ruling in London, with Jeremy Corbyn’s speech then brought forward nearly 24 hours.

That ruling only made conference even stranger. I managed to chair a fringe at 12.30pm on Tuesday and emerge 90 minutes later to find everything had changed, the conference schedule had been ripped up and many people were already headed back to Westminster, curtailing the whole show.

One councillor noted that they'd 'been to worse ones', but still concluded that it had been 'crackers' overall.

Others variously described it to me as ‘dreadful’, ‘horrible’ and a ‘clusterf***’, while one MP simply concluded grimly: “We’re such a bunch of sh*t bastards,” although I think they were referring to MPs in general, which doesn't really make it any better.

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Greater Manchester’s Labour Party may have gone a bit independent

It would be wrong to suggest there were no Greater Manchester delegates at conference this year, but many of the figures you might have expected to attend were curiously absent.

Mayor Andy Burnham didn’t show and nor did Manchester Central MP Lucy Powell, the latter having spent the last few weeks fighting attempts to deselect her.

Only two of our council leaders, Salford’s Paul Dennett and Trafford’s Andrew Western, made it down.

Even backbench councillors seemed pretty thin on the ground.

With a big chunk of our MPs serving in some kind of shadow ministerial capacity, inevitably they were all doing the rounds, but otherwise, it felt as though the region had in large part decided the trip to Brighton simply wasn’t worth it.

Andy Burnham’s absence was particularly noticed, given that London’s Sadiq Khan, Liverpool’s Steve Rotheram and the north east’s Jamie Driscoll had all made it, particularly as he was listed as a speaker on many fringe events about issues such as transport and northern devolution.

It’s worth noting that mayors get no platform in the conference hall anymore, a curious development for a party that says it wants to devolve power to grassroots level.

But as we reported in the summer , there is markedly little interaction between the mayor and Labour’s top team anyway, leading Greater Manchester’s Labour operation to look rather independent of the national operation these days.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

She’s running

Another extraordinary thing, one that in normal times would be a sackable offence but in 2019 barely registered on the strange-ometer.

My first job on arriving at party conference was to attend a briefing by shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry, which turned out to have nothing whatsoever to do with her portfolio.

I walked in to hear her reading out private internal polling, revealing that more than 40pc of Labour’s 2017 vote had deserted it, mainly for remain-leaning parties.

In Scotland that exodus was particularly stark, with the party having lost most of its voters, but even in heartlands like the north west and the midlands, more than one in three said they would not vote Labour this time around.

Thornberry used this to make her main point ahead of the following day’s vote on Brexit policy: Labour should explicitly back remain in an election and in a referendum.

She didn’t agree with Jeremy Corbyn on his plan to stay neutral in any poll, she said.

Whether she was daring him to sack her is unclear, but, this being 2019, he didn’t.

It left few in much doubt about what else was going on, however, despite her protestations to the contrary - this looked like the pitch being rolled for an eventual leadership bid.

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Towns ‘must be a top priority’

My personal conference highlight was chairing a fringe by the think-tank Centre for Towns, which discussed how government needs to change its approach to towns, breaking the cycle that has seen many - especially in the north - facing long-term decline and bubbling political frustration.

Wigan MP Lisa Nandy, who helped set up the organisation, spoke eloquently about the way areas such as hers had long felt overlooked.

Up until the EU referendum, she said, Westminster had assumed those places were merely apathetic, not turning out to vote.

But, she said, it turned out they were actually furious: politicians simply ‘couldn’t hear the roar behind the silence’.

The future of those places must now be top priority, she said, in particular finding ways to ensure that they feel in control of decisions, instead of them being made miles away in London.

But she also made a point that will ring true for those with doubts about Greater Manchester’s current set-up under devolution.

Any approach must ‘not just devolve power from one group of men in London to another group of men in Manchester town hall’, she said, suggesting many places outside of Greater Manchester’s centre feel no more empowered under devolution than they did previously.

Mark Gregory, UK chief economist for EY, also described some of the patterns happening beneath the surface: London’s economy is so resilient that although foreign direct investment to the UK fell last year - with Brexit being a key driver - it stayed flat in the capital, because money tends to go to places investors know about in uncertain times.

That, of course, only reinforces the problem.

It was entirely refreshing to discuss so many overlapping issues facing communities in Greater Manchester. But of course it didn’t last long, because by the time it was over, the Brexit madness in Westminster had closed in and conference was being wrapped up early.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

And one thing we didn’t learn…

Despite a brutal row on the conference floor, Labour did not decide how to campaign in a second referendum.

Three motions were put to members. Two of them reflected the leadership’s position, which is to strike a deal with Europe then put it to the public in a referendum - but not, yet, to decide how it will campaign in that vote.

The other would have seen Labour come out for remain and to then campaign on that position in any upcoming general election.

Ultimately it descended into a fight about procedure, as so many things in the Labour Party tend to do.

The chair had taken votes by asking for a show of hands, and initially stated that the ‘remain’ motion had passed.

But then that decision was swiftly reversed, after the party’s general secretary Jennie Formby was seen whispering to her. Demands for a ‘card vote’ - an accurate count of the result - were overruled, the motion fell, and Labour ended up passing the leadership’s position.

One delegate in the room said it was difficult to tell whether the remain motion had, in reality, passed or not. But they did say they believed there were people in the hall casting votes who weren’t entitled to be there.

“It was a f***ing disgrace,” they added of the episode.

Ether way, we can look forward to that same row rumbling on indefinitely.