Only one thing could have stopped Jeremy Corbyn: if the coup mounted by the Labour right in the week beginning 27 June had actually been a coup. They had momentum – anti-Corbyn shadow cabinet members at one point seemed to be resigning as fast as they were volunteering. If the Labour frontbench operation had collapsed through understaffing, leaving Corbyn incapable of fulfilling the duties of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition, the way was open either to handing the role to the SNP – or forming a separate “continuity Labour” group in parliament.

For those of us among what was, at that time, a loose alliance of rank-and-file Corbynistas, it felt like Stalingrad. We had our backs to the river and were throwing cavalry against tanks. What ended the crisis was not some counterstroke by Corbyn himself but the launch of Saving Labour.

Saving Labour looked and smelled so similar to the operation launched by the cold war faction of Labour against the miners and printers in the 1980s that it was uncanny. All it needed to complete the parallel was for the MP Gloria De Piero to call for Sun readers to join Labour to overthrow Corbyn. That was the moment we realised the Corbyn leadership was not up against a serious organic revolt of members, but one manufactured by the neoliberal stay-behinds.

As the result of the coup’s failure, Labour’s conference this week has a visible faultline running through it. People floating mysteriously between corporate fringe events, dressed in the sharp suits and shiny tights of the Blair-Brown era, are still there. But nobody really understands why.

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Networking between the remnants of the Mandelson set and pro-austerity Labour councils must be one of the most thankless tasks in PR right now; like being a court correspondent for a Tsarist newspaper during the Russian revolution.

The contrast is not just with the bouncy, T-shirt-wearing graduates at the Momentum event, struggling as people queue round the block to hear from the Sex Workers Open University, Podemos and Black Lives Matter. Inside the conference, too, what used to be known as the “woolly-hat brigade” – working-class people with a lifelong commitment to socialism – have begun to jostle into packed meeting rooms and find their voice.

Having spent much of the summer alongside the people who delivered Corbyn’s victory, two things are obvious that the media coverage has missed.

First: this is a real, networked reinvention of social democracy. My heart leapt on Saturday when the SWP handed me a leaflet saying it did not want to be part of Corbyn’s Labour. The feeling is mutual. Though there are undoubtedly far-left activists inside Momentum, they are a small minority swimming in a sea of networked, horizontal, democratic, globalist and liberal young professionals who regard them, largely, as oddities. When the man in charge of crowdfunding the Momentum fringe event approached me for help, I asked what had brought him into this. He’d studied social movements at university, he said, and spent five years in banking.

Though Corbyn himself, and many of his rally-goers, are gung-ho for scrapping Trident, this young inner core of activists understands the difference between principles and tactics. They know they’ve been handed a historic opportunity to pursue one thing – social justice – and they’ve no intention of letting it slip.

The second thing media coverage misses is the pent-up excitement Corbyn is tapping into. He has become Zen-like himself. But I have never seen the streets around a political conference venue come alive in the way Liverpool did with Labour this weekend. “The whole city’s buzzing,” a bloke said, accosting me. He had his teenage son with him; they were on their way between the Momentum fringe and a pro-Corbyn comedy event.

The challenge is to turn that buzz into something relevant to service personnel’s families on a rainy estate in Portsmouth; or to Scots enthralled by the cultural renaissance of their nation; or jobless kids in the Welsh valleys drawn by the white identity politics of Ukip.

For me, a bit-part player in the failed Bennite movement and witness to the betrayal of the printers and the miners, Corbyn’s victory on Saturday was about more than politics.

On the way there, I checked my family tree on the Ancestry website. From about 1790 my patrilineal line goes: labourer, hatter, hatter, hatter, miner, miner, economics editor. Some of that recent upward mobility is a result of the postwar boom – which it’s now fashionable to claim was a one-off in the history of capitalism. Some of it was about how Labour shaped the postwar boom in the interests of the working class.

On my way to the announcement, in a bus stop, I scrawled a sign I wanted to hold up if Corbyn won. It said: “This is for all our ancestors.”

But the event itself was quiet, stunned; nobody sang The Red Flag. There was a media scrum but a hall half empty. So unused to events of historic significance have we become that we wander around concussed when they happen. People who wish the event had not happened rush to the airwaves to denounce them.

But you cannot stop history. At some point, having been hijacked by the elite class, Labour was always either going to collapse – as it has done in Scotland – or revive. What we witnessed was both revival and survival. Labour’s polls – in the teeth of a hostile press and active sabotage from within – may be low. But they are the highest of any socialist party in Europe.