Jeremy Corbyn’s passage from antihero to premier-in-waiting is the phenomenon of modern politics. Three months ago the idea was absurd that a gauche, accident-prone backbench grump might plausibly stand before cheering supporters and declare himself “in the political mainstream … on the threshold of power and ready for government”. Yet so it is. Were Theresa May’s Tories to implode, which is at least possible, Corbyn has every chance of entering Downing Street.

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So far, so remarkable. Party conferences are poor guides to the political weather, as party manifestos are to actions in government. But Corbyn’s speech in Brighton showed a man who has clearly triumphed in the first task of leadership. He was polished, confident, and comfortable in himself. And if his speech was blighted by cliches, they were cliches that his audience adored. Gone, for the time being, are doubts that the election may have been “peak Corbyn”, and that Labour was going into another cul-de-sac, in the style of Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.

Corbyn must be aware that the weapon he used to silence his critics was the biggest bourgeois bribe in British electoral history: of up to £50,000 from the public purse to each member of the student half of the voter cohort. Since there is no evidence that tuition fees curb working-class access to university, and since repayments are means tested, the bribe surpassed even Thatcher’s mortgage interest tax relief. But Corbyn proved that today’s young Britons are at least capable of gratitude. The Pied Piper of Glastonbury won Labour its greatest poll surge in recent times.

Corbyn’s next achievement was politically to weaponise his giveaway, as the Liberal Democrats’ Nick Clegg failed to do in 2010. He turned from an incompetent into a deft party manager, outflanking party sceptics on the left and right, and imposing a new discipline on those round him. This was the more considerable given his meagre reserve of parliamentary talent.

Play Video 4:19 Jeremy Corbyn's conference speech in four minutes – video highlights

At the conference, the Labour leader unleashed the red guards of the Momentum movement, authors of the dazzling Brighton “off-conference” stage, The World Transformed. He did not curb his hot-blooded colleagues, such as the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, or prove averse to savaging such traditional Labour hate figures as the City, corporate executives and the press.

Labour is apparently to become more “accountable to its members”. Tony Blair used the same language in circumventing the Labour apparat in favour of a “strong leader and followers”. It is internal democracy as atomised and distanced from parliament. At Brighton, even those political hobbits, Labour’s elected mayors, were denied a share of the limelight, until London’s Sadiq Khan understandably rebelled. Labour has a leader not just in control, but aware of how to keep it.

Corbyn got where he is through a gesture to the haves, not the have-nots, and through old-fashioned party discipline

While Corbyn’s power structure appears in place, it is less easy to detect how he means to use it. It was significant that he dared not face a conference vote on single-market Brexit – by far the biggest issue of the day. That he got away with this was a sign of his strength; that he needed to was weakness. Labour’s declared wish to “stay within the basic terms of a single market and customs union for a decent period” is hardly controversial. Beyond this transition, Corbyn degenerated into abstractions over “jobs, rights and decent living standards”. He wants “access to” but not necessarily membership of “a” single market. He jeered at the Tories for being “more interested in posturing for personal advantage than in getting the best deal for Britain”. The charge also sticks to Corbyn. We still have no idea what deal Labour would support “as best for Britain”.

Peer behind the slogans about “the many not the few” and Corbyn’s programme reeks of old Labour revivalism, as if he had been on an archaeological dig through pre-Blair manifestos. Will Corbyn’s gargantuan appetite for public spending really be met entirely from higher corporation tax? Is the answer to public services really a return to nationalisation, social housing estates, rent controls and labour laws? The evidence is that something is systematically wrong with the ordering of Britain’s health and education services. Simply promising to hurl great gobs of nonexistent money at them is hardly “a new age in politics”.

The last Labour governments privatised more public assets than Margaret Thatcher. It makes sense for Corbyn to want to draw down the curtain on these privately financed debts. But how? The same question hovers over tuition fees. If Labour intends to print public money – no bad idea in itself - it should say so. But it risks the irresponsibility trap that Gordon Brown so studiously avoided in 1997. And just when the NHS is showing every sign of terminal overcentralisation, it seems bizarre to propose the same model for a “national education service”. Will we have pupils queuing outside overcrowded schools waiting for lessons?

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Corbyn says he wants to “devolve” accountability to local people, but so did Blair. He makes no mention of letting councils decide for themselves on housing and planning policy. He gives no indication of uncapping council taxes, and thus truly ending austerity from the bottom up. In the terminology of the new politics, Corbyn’s accountability is to national “anywheres”, not local “somewheres”. Some of these questions will doubtless be answered in time, but it would be good to know Corbyn’s direction of travel. When he came to office as a rank outsider, sceptics as well as fans hoped he might say the unsayable. Perhaps he would inject novelty and daring into public debate. He would back CND and ban Trident. He would demand military withdrawal from Britain’s overseas entanglements. He would call for an end to counterproductive drugs laws. He would stop control-freak secondary education. There has been none of this. Instead we have support for Tory vanity projects such as HS2, Hinkley Point and Heathrow expansion.

The first obligation on the left is radicalism, not revivalism. Corbyn got where he is today through a gesture to the haves, not the have-nots, and through old-fashioned party discipline. That worked, bringing him support bordering on hysteria. As a result, we hear Henry V telling Falstaff: “Presume not that I am the thing I was … I have turned away my former self.” We have now got the point. We eagerly await the new self.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist