It is less than 18 months since Ed Balls was one of the big beasts of British politics. Yet how long ago that era seems when one reads his agonised account of the May 2015 election in his memoir, Speaking Out. As a Financial Times reviewer pungently put it, the Balls generation already “reeks of yesterday.”

Labour lost last year, Balls writes, because it was not sufficiently trusted on the economy, and because Ed Miliband was not credible enough as a potential prime minister. This is what most politicians, as well as most political scientists, election analysts and commentators, myself included, believed at the time and believe now.

Yet Jeremy Corbyn spoke to the Labour party conference this week as if such things simply did not matter to Labour any more. Buoyed by his emphatic re-election and by the surge of activism in his party, he produced a 21st-century socialist wishlist of policies that flew in the face of the collective common sense of modern politics. Credible economic management? That’s old thinking now. People want hope of change. Competent leadership? It’s the message not the messenger that matters.

Although Corbyn talked about the importance of elections, it is abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with winning on the centre ground in ways that earlier generations on left and right regarded as inescapable. Economic management and competent leadership were always the lodestars of that approach, though not the only tests of centre ground appeal. By these yardsticks, Labour lost in 2015 because the Tories were preferred as best party for the economy by an 18-point margin and because David Cameron was preferred to Miliband as prime minister by 17 points.

It is hardly surprising that Corbyn does not want to be judged in the same way. How could he, when his ratings are so poor? The Tories remain 17 points ahead of Labour on the economy. Meanwhile Corbyn trails Theresa May by an eye-watering 58 points on net satisfaction. Labour may not be living in la-la land, as the Daily Mail claimed this week, but it is certainly engaged in an attempt to substitute a new political reality for the old one.

The problem for Labour is that the centre ground hasn’t gone away. When offered a choice of left, centre-left, centre, centre-right or right, 45% of all British voters in an Opinium survey still regard themselves as being in the very centre of the political spectrum. A huge 77% of the British public see themselves either as centrists or centre-left or centre-right. Only 19% see Corbyn as being in the same territory, compared with 46% for Balls and 49% for Tony Blair.

By contrast, May is seen as on or close to the centre ground by 44% of all voters. This is one reason why it might be unwise to fall into the fashionable trap of claiming that the centre-focused politics that stretched from the John Major era to that of Cameron is either phoney or finished.

Labour has undoubtedly moved on. But those who think that May represents something equivalent on the Tory side of the aisle misread what is happening. The change in the Tory party since the summer is not a retreat from centrism. It may be better understood simply as a recasting, a less metropolitan liberal and more hard-edged version of centrism.

May exhibits no sign whatever of being willing to leave the centre untended, as Corbyn does. Just because she has put some very rightwing people in her cabinet, or because she has reopened the question of selection in schools, or because she is tasked with implementing Brexit, it does not follow that May is the mirror image of Corbyn.

Next week’s Conservative conference will be a test for her. She is adamant she is not abandoning the centre ground. But she does think that she is fashioning a more modern, more post-liberal, more Brexit-aware version of it.

The centre is always mobile. Today we live in more economically fragile times than in the Blair years. Those who are “just managing”, and who May has pledged to support, have a tougher time and fewer expectations than their equivalents a generation ago. Politics is viewed with more mistrust, seen as having failed to control widening inequality and unfairness. And immigration, real and imagined, has hardened attitudes.

In any case, centrist politics was never as technocratic as its enemies pretend. In the 1960s, Harold Wilson did not just promote economic stewardship and effective leadership. He invoked flag and family, and cultivated an image of domestic, pipe-smoking ordinariness that was at odds with his well-hidden taste for cigars and brandy. In the present day, what is the SNP in Scotland but centrist government wrapped in a mastery of the symbolic and the rhetorical?

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The Blair-Balls-Cameron generations were much less good at this. Blair in particular had a blind spot, which became a hostility, to the public’s attachments and in particular to the public’s fear of change. Though the public admired his competence as a domestic leader, they never bought into his embrace of change for change’s sake, his love of the new and disruptive, his indifference to tradition.

Though much has changed in the world, good management of the economy and competent leadership remain the essentials of any election-winning strategy. But a really smart centrist has to master the cultural as well as the technocratic, especially in tough economic times. Corbyn has some grasp of the former but possesses little or none of the latter. May, in her centre-right way, seems to have a much firmer sense of both – which is probably why she is winning.