The last time I saw Jeremy Corbyn address Labour members here was a year ago.

It was the start of July and he was speaking at a Unison hustings at the Renaissance hotel in Manchester city centre , near the start of the leadership campaign. The audience was, as you would expect, appreciative of his standpoint.

So he got a warm reception, certainly warmer than Liz Kendall and from recollection warmer than the others too, but there were no fireworks. He ended on a Tony Benn quote.

The event was pretty dull all round if I'm honest.

At the end, when I looked to get quotes from the candidates about the rail electrification campaign we were running (bloody mainstream media, I know - I don't know who we think we are), I had to go through some kind of campaign wonk or press officer in order to get to most of them.

Jeremy Corbyn was different. He gave probably the most heartfelt quote of all of them about the need for rail investment and renationalisation, but he wasn't keen to speak for long and he clearly hadn't factored in the possibility that anyone might ask him to. It was literally just grabbing a quick chat with a slightly crabby backbencher, sans entourage.

He shuffled hurriedly away after speaking for about 20 seconds. And that was that.

Today I walked into an auditorium in Salford and the Labour person who walked in with me took one look around and just said: 'F***. What is happening?'

Around 1,700 people had packed out the Lowry - according to Momentum's figures - on Saturday to hear Corbyn speak. A cloud of adoration hung in the air above the rows and rows of - in many cases young - party supporters.

That fervour has erupted in less than 12 months. And erupted it really has.

The reaction to the Yorkshire MP Richard Burgon, who addressed them passionately before Corbyn, was revealing before the Labour leader even spoke. The mention of Tony Blair drew boos and hisses. The mention of the miners' strike, an event firmly entrenched in rose-tinted Labour mythology, drew an ovation. The mention of the Guardian, when he said it couldn't tell working class people what to think, drew massive applause too.

(I don't write for the Guardian, clearly. But I'm not sure its core readership is working class, whatever that is these days. Unless the country's poorer demographics have developed a fixation with turmeric lattes that I don't know about. That's aside from the fact that Corbyns's strategy chief, Seumas Milne, is on secondment from the Guardian.)

But the love for Corbyn was, in that auditorium, off the chart. The Labour member stood next to me said she had seen nothing like it since the early days of Blair - a man who, it was pointed out to me last week, in 1996 was causing women to pass out in hysteria when he was out and about, Beatles-style.

He was the future once, too.

There was not an awful lot new in what Corbyn said at the Lowry from a directional or policy point of view.

Equality, homelessness, social justice. Lovely things for a world that sucks. Lovely things that lovely people will love, mostly lovely things that are impossible to argue against. Lovely things relating to unlovely problems we write about all the time, and about which Theresa May has said similarly lovely things in the last couple of weeks.

(Image: Eddie Garvey)

But there was no indication of how to do it, apart from a policy on gender pay - to be welcomed, of course - that is an expansion of a Tory policy.

It doesn't matter, though. Lovely things, combined with angry things about people who doubted the practical possibility of achieving the lovely things without a plan, was what the crowd wanted.

That was what they got. The preacher was in the house and so too was the choir.

"I'm going to tell you something now you won't have read in any of the papers, because none of them had any space to carry it whatsoever, because they are very, very busy with all the important news of the day," he said, to knowing laughter.

"On Thursday, which is 36 hours ago, so the news should have got through by now, there was a by election in the district of Thanet, in north Kent, a by election in which the Labour candidate Penny Newman took the seat from UKIP and won it for Labour."

Cue wild applause that went on for ages.

Momentarily I was genuinely stumped. But not for long. Labour hadn't won some kind of massive victory in Thanet that I'd missed, but had in fact (just) won a parish council election in Ramsgate in which around 500 people took part.

The UKIP incumbent had stood down from both that seat and his role in the district council. In the higher level district council election, UKIP won.

On the face of it it is the stuff of farce, yet again. To anyone with a grasp of politics - and perhaps that is key here - clearly that win means absolutely nothing.

To anyone with a glancing understanding of news, a parish council election is local news, really really local news, and indeed Kent Online did cover it.

When Corbyn says sarcastically that the 'mainstream media' ignored it because they were busy doing other things, he answered his own implied passive-aggressive question. We have just left the EU and got a new Prime Minister, news he had greeted variously with entirely contradictory statements and - in the case of Theresa May - by attending a Cuba solidarity meeting.

Those working class Guardian readers were no doubt delighted.

(Image: Eddie Garvey)

But such a bizarre proclamation shows Corbyn is no longer just the man who shuffles away awkwardly from journalists. He knows exactly how to handle his faithful and the Thanet point will land exactly as intended, fuelling the current narrative among fans. 'Mainstream' journalists will mock. His audience will point to the MSM conspiracy.

Downwards it goes, unless you are a Tory. Go back to your constituencies, Labour MPs, and prepare for deselection.

Criticism only strengthens Corbyn's resolve, as the trigger-happy PLP have found out.

Deeper the divide will become, not just between Corbyn fans and the media or Labour MPs, but between the lovely dream in which a narrow town council by-election win in Kent proves you can be Prime Minister - and reality.

For more from Jen Williams, click here or follow her on Twitter @JenWilliamsMEN.