Set aside the mysteries of his position on Brexit, and imagine for a moment that Jeremy Corbyn’s sudden intervention on high pay and inequality this week had been a bit more effective. Instead of his proposals flipping around like a dropped hosepipe, he might have picked one policy, got his aides to do their homework, and then evangelised about it for the foreseeable future.

I’d settle for the idea he seemed to alight on after ditching a crude wage cap: that government procurement might somehow be limited to firms who stick to a pay ratio of 20:1 and award their executives no more than £350,000 a year – which would be somewhat difficult to pull off without tearing up thousands of public contracts, but has an undeniable oomph.

He might have loudly trailed that idea on social media, so as to create an advance buzz that would have lessened the impression of someone busking it. Most obviously, one can just about conceive of the proposal being suggested in the company of a handful of businesspeople who live out the kind of model Corbyn wants to popularise. Even the sainted John Lewis only caps its pay ratio at 75:1 – but people from a few medium-sized businesses, or maybe successful co-operatives, might have stood alongside him and underlined a simple enough message: this can be done, and it makes for better business.

Judging by advance Labour whispers, the shoot-from-the-hip approach that so misfired was indicative of an attempt to copy the approach to politics favoured by Donald Trump, to which there is only one response: that whatever the other odorous clouds now following him around, Trump is about to take office with the worst disapproval ratings of any president-elect in history. Moreover, his one-man crusade, 95% based on personal aggrandisement, has precious little to teach any politician meant to be in charge of a convincing project.

Besides, Corbyn could no more approximate Trump-esque barnstorming rhetoric than he could fly. If Tuesday was an attempt to do so, out in the electoral badlands of Nuneaton, Thurrock etc – and Copeland, where next month’s byelection may yet deepen Labour’s problems – both the high-pay stuff and Corbyn’s almost indecipherable manoeuvrings on the EU and immigration surely got nowhere near what was intended. In fact, they had a familiar quality: since the Gordon Brown years, voters have got used to Labour trying to reboot itself at regular intervals, essentially because the party can no longer confidently speak to the country.

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Over a year into the Corbyn era, what do people know of him and where he is heading? He and his allies want to renationalise the railways, and also “renationalise” the NHS, neither of which is much of a revelation. They have an assortment of vague policies for more investment in the economy. Nothing, in fact, has yet cohered into a story about modern Britain. Meanwhile, Corbyn and his people sporadically respond to Tory failures in a way that evokes the ageless advice of Sun Tzu: “Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Their muddled take on Brexit has simply highlighted their muddledness across the piece. So, in polls, there are no end of falling Labour figures, and personal approval ratings that almost defy belief. When I am out reporting, what strikes me is the way that mention of Corbyn and his party tends to be met with a sighing indifference, as if his supposedly scary politics are less defining than his simple irrelevance.

So what to do? Viewed from a certain angle, he has two key assets: a lifelong distance from the mushy mainstream, and increasingly little to lose. If, as his aides insist, he wants to push beyond the politics of Brexit by floating big, radical ideas, he perhaps should have started not with the supposedly “populist” wheeze of a wage cap – but a less mechanistic idea that goes to the heart of the insecurity and uncertainty that defines millions of lives: that of a universal basic income, sporadically bigged up by Corbyn and John McDonnell over the last year, worked on by a growing number of thinkers, and now being seriously considered by clued-up Labour people in Scotland.

Given the benefits system is now completely inappropriate for a job market that increasingly pulls people in and then rapidly spits them back out again, universal basic income could conceivably sit at the heart of a plan to rip the whole thing up and start again. An axe could be taken to the parts of the big state that have outlived their usefulness: such as the Department for Work and Pensions, which could be wholly devolved, handing the hated JobCentre Plus network to a mixture of local councils and third-sector organisations. To go with the grain of Brexit, moreover, the income could be contingent on British citizenship and the taking of decently funded English lessons.

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The Mail and Sun, of course, would still go ape – but that, we’re told, is now precisely the idea. Besides, from there, Corbyn could link UBI to the defining crisis of our time: that of social care, and our ageing society. It is time someone in politics unflinchingly looked ahead and told us the truth: that austerity is to blame for most of the current crisis, but even so, in the years to come, caring for our older relatives will not be something we will be able to wholly palm off on the state.

Again, in the recent past, Corbyn has raised a good idea – for education and training that can happen at any time in people’s adult lives. To that, he could add maternity and paternity leave that could be taken throughout parenthood. Both would attempt to cast the stop-start nature of modern work as an opportunity, not a threat.

Looking ahead, it is increasingly a given that work will define a declining share of most lives. Even now, wage stagnation and insecure jobs are leading to falling tax receipts, with grave implications for our ageing, work-light future. Meanwhile, tax avoidance by Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Uber and the rest has regularly bounced into the headlines. These corporations trigger no end of social and economic turbulence and mine our data while giving far too little back, and they ought to be right at the centre of Labour’s attention.

More generally, a lot of what Corbyn ought to do was pointed up by Tuesday’s failures. He needs to reach out way beyond his party and find as many allies as he can. He should always do his homework. And please, Jeremy: even if you pursue the wage cap, ditch the Lenin one. It doesn’t suit you, or the future.