“A queer experience, always, that conference,” wrote Virginia Woolf of a visit to the Labour party annual gathering at Hastings in 1933. “The door opened into a buzzing bursting humming perfectly self-dependent other world.”

Were Virginia to be reanimated and transported to this year’s Labour conference in Liverpool, you sense the hermetically sealed new politics might not have looked quite so new to her. Then again, there do seem to have been certain … developments since 1933. As an on-off antisemite, for instance, she may have welcomed this year’s bogglingly increased number of opportunities to discuss “the Jewish question”.

By way of illustration, consider this snapshot of about three hours on the first evening of the conference. At 7.15, there was a Jewish Labour Movement rally against racism and antisemitism. At 7.30, there was an event organised by Jewish Socialists for Justice, entitled Anti-Zionism is not Anti-Semitism. By this stage, a chap manning the Labour Friends of Israel stand in the conference auditorium had revealed that he had been approached by another chap asking, rhetorically, “But wasn’t there a Jewish plot to oust Jeremy Corbyn?”, following up with the inquiry, “But it was organised by Jewish MPs, wasn’t it?” and continuing in this vein until his attempt to confirm that Angela Eagle’s “husband” is Jewish caused the LFI volunteer to curtail the discussion.

Jackie Walker: Momentum’s vice-chair. Photograph: Andy Hall for the Observer

A few minutes’ walk away, at Momentum’s concurrent conference, the hours between 5pm and 7pm were given over to a debate featuring the movement’s vice chair, one Jackie Walker, whose chief claim to fame was previously being briefly suspended from the Labour party for an allegedly antisemitic social media post (though today it was revealed she had enlivened a conference antisemitism training session by declaring it would be “wonderful” if Holocaust Memorial Day was not just for the Jews). On Sunday, however, she took the opportunity to judge that her claim to Jewish identity had been questioned by Jewish publications, “because I’m a black person and that’s it”.

Fellow panellist and Jewish Labour chair Jeremy Newmark was rebuked from the floor for comments about the Holocaust, the speaker referencing the current “police holocaust” against black people. Newmark cited a poll showing just 8% of British Jews supported Labour; an audience member demanded: “Whose fault is that!” The event’s title: Does Labour have an Antisemitism Problem?

To which the only possible answer seems to be: what does it effing look like? I’m sure there were party conferences in the year 1933 at which the Jews were this much discussed. But not, perhaps, in this country.

Still, roll up for the progressive future. These days, party conferences – for all the parties – have about as much cut-through as minor fluctuations in the bale price on the Karachi cotton exchange. When I was young, the BBC daytime schedules were cleared for live screening of all the speeches from the podiums, allowing viewers to really get inside the action of a plenary session on NEC constitutional amendments. I don’t know what they rated then, but now they’d struggle even to rate at all. To watch someone bellowing from the podium about this being the most exciting moment in socialism in decades is to know more powerfully than you have ever known anything that it would get murdered by a Jeremy Kyle repeat.

John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn at conference. Photograph: Leon Neal/Getty Images

Did hastily rewritten shadow defence secretary Clive Lewis punch a wall or didn’t he? It’s unconfirmed, but unless he had somehow contrived to punch a wormhole right through the backdrop of the Trump-Clinton debate, political attention was largely concentrated a few thousand miles west of here this week.

Still, there were some diversions. This year, the conference bubble has a precocious off-Broadway rival in the form of Momentum’s own festival, which goes under the banner of The World Transformed, and sports amusing innovations such as an “actor in residence”. I particularly enjoyed the series of three giant artworks pointing out diffidently that “Advertising Shits in Your Head”. The Momentum fringe is unquestionably far more vibrant and jolly than the conference proper, but the comparison feels like a discussion about which occupant of a morgue would perform best on Strictly. I feel I have to challenge the assertion one Momentum attendee made to Paul Mason, namely that “the whole city’s buzzing”. But perhaps I was plodding round the wrong bits of it.

Anyway, the festivities began last Saturday with the Labour party renewing its vows with Corbyn. “Genuinely the best moment of my life,” a very nice and enthusiastic young Momentum member told me. “An even worse idea than when my parents got back together for the second time,” shuddered my husband. I believe the modern way past this division is to observe vaguely that everyone can only live their truth. For some, that means operating on a higher plane of politics. You might have heard about Tom Watson’s eye-catching speech praising the achievements of the Blair-Brown years, during which I imagine the autocue cable was simply cut on paragraph three. When Watson got to a line declaring, “We need to win elections”, there were several boos from the floor.

Fringe event: Momentum’s The World Transformed festival attracts the crowds. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Wherever you stand on this slightly idiosyncratic version of enthusiasm and energy, though, to be among it for a few days is to be reminded anew of its essential draw. I know those on the centre left think Corbyn has stolen everybody’s future and whatnot, but watching him take the podium stronger than ever, they have to concede that part of the excitement of the past year for Corbynistas is that they are basically involved in a plot that’s straight out of the movies. An anonymous guy is suddenly – by an extraordinary series of events – catapulted on to the big stage. Vast crowds mass to hear him speak, his iconic image is plastered on everything. It all becomes increasingly intoxicating, in a quasi-religious type of way, and almost frighteningly unmanageable before he has even had a chance to change his jacket.

I would say we are now at the end of Act One. If you are asking me how this type of movie usually progresses, it eventually becomes clear that it could have been him, but it could have been anybody. As the plot thickens, it turns out that our hero is utterly expendable to the wider machine, and potentially a minor inconvenience down the line when They have to sideline him to keep his legacy alive for The Cause (not that one, just a generic Cause). But it’s altogether simpler for Them if he can just fall off something and get martyred. Of course, he won’t.

Traditionally, this all sets up a great Act Three in which the hero can go full training montage and show what he is really made of by bringing down the whole edifice/getting crushed and sent to live in disappointed exile. Who stars? Hanks if you can get him, or obviously a young Jimmy Stewart. Costner would ruin it, though not as badly as the signs suggest Corbyn will.

A year in to his leadership, and despite his best major speech performance yet, Corbyn still comes across across as someone all this is happening to, as opposed to because of. Monday morning found him touring and posing among the official conference stands. When he came to the one run by the Labour Campaign for Mental Health, he smiled and dutifully held up their placard reading Bring Back The Shadow Cabinet Minister For Mental Health – a post he scrapped in July. Perhaps he is so used to decades of ineffectually waving protest banners that he didn’t realise this was one campaign he alone had the power to fix.

Pure poetry: a book of poems in praise of Corbyn at Momentum’s The World Transformed event. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Whether the alarm bells ring for him as he tours Momentum stands selling £10 books of fan poetry about himself is unclear. He doesn’t let on, though I don’t know if he has specifically read, say, Someone Happened by Abigail E O Wyatt. “Someone crept in/ and lit a candle in our hearts/ that someone happened/ to be him.” Either way, I have been to Madonna tours with less merchandise featuring the star. Alan Partridge’s reaction when faced with similarly T-shirted and enshrined levels of fandom was to run for the hills screaming, “You’re a mentalist!”, but Corbyn seems more relaxed about this aspect of his role than any other.

It’s not just doggerel and JC singlets, though. Wares available in the main Labour conference venue ranged from the gently self-parodic – £2 beard comb, anyone? – to remnants from the besuited, Mandelsonian era of City style. One stall sold ties and cufflinks and socks in a tin, though a brisk trade did not seem to be happening. Over at Momentum, a man had set out a table offering anti-army merchandise. “Join the army,” enticed the cover of a pamphlet. “Free prosthetic limbs!” That one was competitively priced at £10.

Away from the retail opportunities, the moral relativism is striking. At a Momentum event discussing the menace of media bias, there were loud cheers and applause for the notion that “the BBC’s treatment of Jeremy Corbyn has been a much bigger disgrace than the Daily Mail’s”. All visitors to The World Transformed were handed a document calling for “a democratic media”, which contains what you might think would have been a real warning-sign of a quote. “Of course,” this runs, “the only media we can really rely on is our own.” Spoken like all the good guys of history, right there.

One speaker from the floor solved the problem of Jeremy and the media via recourse to a discussion in The Matrix on spoonbending. It is explained to Neo that, “It is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.” What this showed very clearly, the woman concluded, was that, “Jeremy Corbyn should not bend to the media; the media should bend to Jeremy Corbyn.” Mmm. I have always had a weakness for those great 1968 graffiti slogans (“Do not adjust your mind – there is a fault in reality”). But with the best will in the world, there actually is a spoon. There are lots of spoons. Experience – bitter or otherwise – suggests they are going to have to make their peace with the notion of spoons.

Corbyn in Liverpool: all a matter of spoons. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Finally, as someone who has been spared conference attendance for what I think must be 10 years, one of the most striking aspects was the almost total lack of security. In the run-up to the event, there was a faintly embarrassing saga when it looked like Labour couldn’t get any firm to provide security services. My instinct at that moment was that they should have got the Hell’s Angels to do it, like the Rolling Stones did at the Altamont festival in 1969, but perhaps the fatalities put them off. In the end, Labour went with another firm (albeit one criticised for its use of zero-hours contracts).

But this week, you basically just walked in with a wave of your pass. The contrast could barely have been more marked with the 40-minute lines to get anywhere near the event that were such a maddening feature of the Blair/Brown era. On the one hand, the absence of that hysterical self-importance was more than welcome. On the other, given the desiccated nature of the event inside and the enduring notion that you are nothing in public life if people can’t manufacture a security threat around you, it did rather give the impression of the Labour conference being somewhere too irrelevant to even dream of attacking. You’d have had more trouble getting into a league football ground. A conference headed for the Conference? I leave it to you to decide. You can only live your truth, after all.