Sunday evening at Labour party conference provides some incredible answers to the question “what would you rather do than watch comeback sex addict Tiger Woods clinch his first tour win in five years?” How about a four-hour simulation to wargame a radical government? Here’s the rubric: “In a game based on the acclaimed novel A Very British Coup, 50 players take on the roles of the different factions of the 1980s Labour party. They must compete and collaborate to ensure that their preferred policies are prioritised by the new government. Others are playing the malign forces of the deep state whose task is to frustrate and sabotage the realisation of Labour’s socialist programme.”

Or as one participant reflected after it was over: “I played as the military but immediately fucked up by making a deal with the Fabians without realising they opposed siting American bases on British soil.” D’oh!

To Labour’s annual gathering, then, and confirmation that all party conferences draw the biggest collection of oddballs outside of a royal wedding. And I absolutely include myself in that category. I was in Windsor for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding earlier this year, where I met at least four people claiming to be the town crier, including one who lived in Massachusetts. And I was in Liverpool this week, where the woman in front of me in a queue for one fringe session was telling her friend: “I really want to buy the Corbyn colouring book .” The common ground between both events is how many attendees will tell you that what they love about Harry/Meghan/Jeremy is how normal they are, even as they are purchasing a bogglingly overpriced mug with that person’s face on it.

Still, on with the show. This week in Liverpool offered a rare opportunity to spot the shadow cabinet, who are apparently all still going. Until now, I had assumed they had witnessed a murder, and had spent the summer hidden in an Amish community raising barns. Only this could explain why I know more about what Thomas Pynchon thinks about universal credit than about what shadow work and pensions secretary Margaret Greenwood does.

Liverpool offered a rare opportunity to spot the shadow cabinet ... Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

But first, the basics. If you’ve never been to a party conference (and let’s face it …) there is a big conference hall where speeches happen. Attached to this is an exhibition space where stands are taken by the likes of Bombardier, Royal Mail, Google, and firms with names such as Tangent (tailored software solutions that support your business). There are also fringe events where speakers debate such matters as whether journalists should be elected, or why we don’t build any houses, when people up and down the land have been saying for a really very long time that what they seriously want and need is houses.

Where Labour diverges from the Tories is that for the past three years it has had a parallel conference run by Momentum, called The World Transformed, which is – and here we get politically technical – much less radioactively boring. Some of the events were clearly staged as a dare, for instance Decolonising Yoga, or Labour’s Animal Welfare Policies With Karaoke, or any session featuring Derby MP Chris Williamson, who is only acceptable in a line-up if it is Arya Stark’s list of names. But Momentum’s volunteers could not be more friendly and enthusiastic. I know you can’t win anything with kids, but they do have Olympic Games-level numbers of helpful young people, all of whom make even John Lewis employees look truculent.

The effect of this has been to cannibalise the main conference event, which increasingly feels like a spaceship that just blew in from the early 2000s, whose passenger manifest reads simply “Westminster bubble”. The old conventions struggle on in zombified form. Shadow ministers still tour those exhibition stands with an aide, who ensures a photo is taken of them looking caring. But probably all the politician really wants is to get retweeted by a Corbyn outrider account like @Rachael_Swindon.

Discussion at Momentum’s ‘parallel conference’, the World Transformed. Photograph: John Harris

Everyone at conference now has their face down in their phones much of the time. “You want to see what people are saying, don’t you?” one middle-aged delegate told me. People not at conference? “People like … people you follow, I suppose. I’ve seen Owen Jones here at things, and Ash from Novara. [Ash Sarkar, senior editor at independent media organisation Novara Media]. But I don’t think Rachael Swindon would be. Maybe she is, I don’t know. I just follow on here.” On Monday I saw that one of the exhibition stands was completely packed, and went to see which shopfront had survived the move to digital. Turned out it was the stand offering phone-charging.

It would take someone much more technical than me to assess the true power of influencers within Labour’s networks. When Kylie Jenner tweeted “sooo does anyone else not open Snapchat anymore?”, $1.7bn was wiped off the firm’s stock. Quite how much ministerial stock Labour’s Kylie Jenners have sway over is debatable, though they are certainly feted by the leadership. If @Rachael_Swindon one day claimed to not really be feeling it as far as Keir Starmer was concerned, would the shadow Brexit secretary swiftly be found in the back of a car somewhere in the weeds? Only time will show.

And so to Brexit. Incredible amounts of energy seemed to have been expended to stay in the same place Labour have been for months on this issue, with a marathon Sunday night session leading to a composite motion. (Obviously, I don’t pretend to understand 97% of the procedural rules of Labour conference. I prefer to let them wash over me, like the shower water in a really slow-motion shampoo advert.)

Shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer prepares for an interview. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

The result is that Labour’s Brexit policy is now a Rorschach inkblot, in which different beholders see support for a second referendum, or the ruling out of a second referendum. Or a vagina. They mostly just look like vaginas, don’t they? Rorschach blots do, I mean – not leading Labour figures making openly conflicting statements about Brexit every hour.

It all kicked off at the weekend when shadow trade secretary Barry Gardiner quoted Sun Tzu to explain why Labour weren’t opposing Brexit more vigorously: “Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.” It’s such a fine line between the sayings of Sun Tzu and those of his brother Shi Tzu, unfortunately, and by Monday it felt like Labour were cleaving to the latter’s dictum: “Never interrupt your mistake when it’s making you enemies.”

Anyway, on to Tuesday. “Nobody is ruling out Remain as an option,” announced Keir Starmer to the delight of half the conference hall. To the delight of the other half, Unite’s Steve Turner later announced that “Despite what Keir Starmer may have said, it will be a … vote on the terms of our departure.” “I don’t think at this stage anybody is talking about extending article 50,” Starmer had said in a breakfast interview. “We need,” Emily Thornberry was explaining by lunch, “to extend article 50.”

Supporters await Jeremy Corbyn’s speech. Photograph: Hannah Mckay/Reuters

Still, you see what you want to see, don’t you? Things feel like they’ve changed even when they haven’t. When they were filming Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock was not happy with how Grace Kelly’s bust looked in a diaphanous nightgown, and privately told the costume designer Edith Head that his leading lady would have to wear falsies. When the message was passed on to Kelly, she declined the opportunity, and the two women affected to take time over some imperceptible adjustments. When Kelly walked back on set, Hitchcock turned triumphantly to Edith and inquired: “See what a difference they make?” In this analogy, the role of Miss Grace Kelly’s boobs will be played by Labour’s Brexit position. And taking the part of Mr Alfred Hitchcock will be the Labour members thinking what a difference has been made.

Which is, rather ominously, not all of the members. The other big plotline this week was the developing power struggle between Labour’s traditional union base and Momentum – what FBU chief Matt Wrack called “an unhealthy division between the union delegates and the membership”. As any watcher of science fiction will confirm, when you create a new breed of sentients, the drama really requires them to turn against you in due course. This is basically what has happened with Labour’s trade unions, which initially welcomed the development of a new political force in the form of Momentum. But as one Labour official put it this week: “Unions are coming to a slow realisation that they’ve created something that they now can’t put back in its box.”

Alas, the unions seem to believe that Momentum have evolved beyond their programming and are starting to demand more. In the case of robots, demanding more means stuff like wondering vaguely if they really have to have sex with every psychopath who pays to visit Westworld; in the case of Momentum it’s stuff like wondering why they can’t have mandatory reselection. To read the anonymous briefings about Momentum from union officials this week was to see a heavy preponderance of words like “unbiddable”. Yup, it’s happened. The units have become … self-aware. If only they’d built an inhibitor into them that would have kept their sapience at manageable levels. Easy to say in hindsight, I guess.

Merchandise stall at the conference. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA

Either way, we now have a situation where some Momentum delegates were jeering “shame!” at union delegates for watering down their deselection plans, while on Monday a group of activists positioned themselves at the entrance of the conference centre to scream that Unite chief Len McCluskey is a “rightwing bastard”.

Other amusements? The three locals having a smoke on a bench just down from one of The World Transformed venues, who were so unaware that the world was being transformed in the building just behind them that they were moved simply to inquire: “Why are there so many fucking bizzies around?” And the fact that the press tent was accessed through a door marked “DOG EXERCISE AREA” was another. I see a few hacks called for their smelling salts over it, but for me it was a special moment, signifying that dog metaphors were back on the table as acceptable elements of Labour discourse. After all, it was only a few weeks ago that John McDonnell was reacting to Chuka Umunna’s plea to “call off the dogs” by stating hotly that “our party members are not dogs”. Similarly, if you are updating your records, I was encouraged by the stall selling coasters of Jeremy Corbyn in Che Guevara beret. Photoshopped hats are clearly also sanctioned once more.

Jeremy Corbyn is congratulated after making his speech. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The biggest downside to conference, it must be said, is all the pathetic conspiracism you can’t help but hear, epitomised by the persistent presence of such groups as Labour Against the Witch Hunt. At one of their events, Chris Williamson explained that party disciplinary action against antisemitism was “McCarthyism”.

On a closely related note, I could live without people wittering knowingly about the “deep state”. The “deep state” is Labour’s broken metatarsal – the preloaded explanation you have before the World Cup has even kicked off for why England aren’t going to fulfil their potential. It won’t be because you’re a long ball team, or because your egos are writing cheques your body can’t cash, or because there isn’t money to pay for any of this stuff. It’ll be because of the deep state. In America, this phrase is the preserve of alt-right MAGA wingnuts. Over here, no one is doing more to make “deep state” happen than Andrew Murray, Corbyn adviser, Unite chief of staff, and former chair of the Stop This Particular War coalition. Last week, Murray wrote a New Statesman article speculating that the “deep state” is behind newspaper reports about delays to his receiving his security pass to work in parliament, and being banned from Ukraine. At conference, he took the opportunity to double down on this, telling a fringe meeting that if the “deep state” tried to block Corbyn’s foreign policy aims: “We would rely on the mobilisation of the mass of people as we did in 2003.”

No doubt, no doubt. In the meantime, the story of how one of 2003’s rebels came to have almost total control over this conference and a membership far beyond remains such an extraordinary one that you can’t help being reminded of it all the time. It’s there in all the Corbyn T-shirts, it’s there in the complete failure of the moderates to get so much as a mention in dispatches this week, and it’s there in headlines like that on the front of Clarion, Momentum’s socialist magazine. “FIGHTING FOR THE SOUL OF CORBYNISM”, this ran. Not much more than three years ago Jeremy Corbyn was a fairly anonymous backbencher: now he’s an ism over whose soul a battle is apparently being fought.

Yet despite the Mike Bassett-ish story of Corbyn’s rise to power, he often seems reluctant to get stuck into the Tories second half, let alone first. Even his climactic conference speech depended on kicking Gordon Brown (as well as the familiar attack on the failing fake news media). But sections of it hinted at looking forward practically. After a summer lavished on an utterly grim antisemitism row largely of his own making, Corbyn promised job creation for areas hit by deindustrialisation, and significantly expanded free childcare. Or to put it in Bassett terms: “Labour will be playing four-four-fucking-two.” At least until the next Brexit split/foreign policy row/man-versus-machines infinity war.