HOW they cheered, the Home Counties arts students and sociology lecturers, as Jeremy Corbyn rattled through the old left’s greatest hits. Ban the bomb, bash the banks, yah boo to the Tories…one more time for the cheap seats at the back! In his speech to its conference in Brighton, the Labour Party’s new leader denounced the unjust and the nasty. He exalted the good and the decent. He joked impishly about silly newspaper attacks (one had accused him of being a Maoist for riding a bicycle, another of endorsing an apocalyptic asteroid strike) and rolled his eyes at the commentariat. Labour’s left was having fun by the sea and Mr Corbyn was its compère, tour manager and rep. He was there to guarantee his base—excruciatingly well intentioned, adorably naive and irredeemably middle-class—a jolly good time. Britain’s most sanctimonious holiday camp had just materialised on the sunny Sussex coast.

To be fair, Labour’s leader (until his election on September 12th an outsider as one of the most left-wing MPs in Westminster) correctly identified several things badly wrong about the country. His best line—“You don’t have to take what you’re given”—was no less resonant for having been borrowed from a former party adviser who had suggested it to five Labour leaders before him. Housing in Britain is impossibly expensive, life for those on the average income and in self-employment too precarious, mental health too low a public-policy priority. Yet beyond his brief nods to those subjects Mr Corbyn gave Britons outside the hall only platitudes; no reflection on how they live their lives, what they care about or what they want from the state. Of Labour’s prospects of forming a government and the hours and sweat that this would levy there came no mention. The party’s new leader offered no struggle more onerous than self-gratification.

It was tempting to forgive him his sloppy speech. As his supporters noted, Mr Corbyn is new to his job and has never pretended to be a great orator. Eyes atwinkle and tie askew, he lurched from subject to subject and back again, traced no overarching argument and used almost no enlivening examples or colour. Watching this monotonous, laboured display Bagehot would not have been surprised to be told that Labour’s leader was seeing the text for the first time. He hammered away at it like Stakhanov at a coal seam, mangled a few lines and at one point appeared to read out a stage direction by accident (“Strong message here!” he proclaimed before a passage on student numbers).

But successful oratory is more discipline than gift; speeches can be crafted, learned and practised. In his diaries Alastair Campbell describes the desk at which Tony Blair, his then-boss, worked on his first conference address as party leader in 1994: “A mass of papers, earlier discarded drafts, papers with his own handwriting, lines straight through it, rejected even before it became a draft.” By contrast Mr Corbyn offered a potpourri of applause lines apparently plucked from press releases and blended at random. His performance betrayed no rehearsal—no bother. That is not “un-spun”, as the Labour leader’s cheerleaders gush. It is lazy. It is a waste of one of a new opposition leader’s few opportunities to make a good impression on the average voter.

Does Mr Corbyn even want to do that? For most conspicuous in the speech was the absence of even a tangential nod to the fact that Labour crumbled at the general election in May, or that without winning the next one in 2020 it will change almost nothing about Britain for over a decade. In the spaces where such acknowledgments should have been there sprawled repeated calls for debate, for participation, for opening up, for a bottom-up party with fizz and ideas and democracy. All of which would have been laudable, had it borne any substantive connection to the party’s ability to win power or deploy those ideas in government. At best the omissions turn Labour into a glorified pressure group; a less sexy version of online campaigning platforms like 38 Degrees and Change.org. At worst they render the party a debating society, there only to make Mr Corbyn’s happy campers feel even better about themselves.

Trump-on-sea

This is part of a bigger story. In his book “Ruling the Void”, Peter Mair, a political scientist who died in 2011, attributed the recent decline of mainstream Western parties and the associated paroxysms of populism to the fragmentation of old, monolithic social groups and classes. When large numbers identify as a mass, they can be rallied around a shared interest (the industrial proletariat around a programme of redistribution, for example). But when people live individualistic and esoteric lives, as most do today, political partisans can win only by vaunting their non-partisan credentials; that is, their skill as technocrats and administrators. So politicians mainly fall into one of two categories: the sensible but bland and the outspoken but unelectable; those who hail “security” and those who bang on about being “straight-talking”. The former are in politics to win and exercise power, the latter to speak primary-coloured truths and create—as Labour’s leader said of young people—“the space for their fizz to explode into the joy we want”. In other words: by picking Mr Corbyn, Britain’s main opposition party has quit the ranks of Merkels, Blairs and Camerons to join the Trumps, Grillos and Farages.

As Bagehot left Brighton his mind turned to the months ahead. Labour’s moderates are already plotting Mr Corbyn’s defenestration. One of the few heartening aspects of the conference was the reconciliation, lubricated by adversity, of different parts of its moderate wing—from the socially conservative “Old Right” to the liberal Blairites. Eventually the party’s leader will fall and will be replaced, probably by one of the sensibles. But until that happens it is taking a long, luxurious holiday from the chill winds of electoral reality. If Britain did not need a serious, credible Labour Party it would all be such fun.