Labour rally: Jeremy Corbyn has lost his mojo and he doesn't have long to find it

At last year’s now traditional eve of conference rally, it was only the unfavourable tide that curtailed Labour’s plan to have their leader walk on water. Jeremy Corbyn was meant to speak to the gathered masses from a platform off Brighton beach, complete with fully Messianic overtones by no means accidental.

But this year, on Saturday night at Pier Head in Liverpool, if the chap that had shuffled on stage almost unnoticed in the rousing twilight, had carried on going twenty more paces and out into the Mersey, even the most undoubting of his disciples would not have been surprised to see him sink below the surface.

On the available evidence thus far, Jeremy Corbyn is not in close contact with his mojo. Last year he shocked everyone, he fought a stunning election campaign. Anyone who came in contact with it left with a smile and a feeling they had been in the company of one of the good guys. And it was there in the late summer air in Brighton too.

That conference was carried aloft on election defeat narrow enough to feel like a victory. This year already feels different.

Corbyn’s Labour has felt like a cult of the personality for some time. But what prevents it feeling fully like the 1930s is the simple inadequacy of the thing that cult is built around. Out on Pier Head there were the flashing lights, there were bands, there were tub thumping speeches, not least from Richard Burgon, which took this author by surprise. But then a void walked out to fill the stage.

He gave a speech as disjointed as any I’ve heard from him, and I’ve heard a few.

It took him barely fifteen seconds to get on to the “attacks that I have had from the mainstream media”. The attacks he refers to are legitimate stories about Labour’s antisemitism problem, albeit from media outlets hostile to left-wing government. That he describes them as attacks tells you precisely how seriously he is taking the problem.

“People are attacking,” he said. “But the more those people come after us, the stronger we are.”

There is only one meaning that can be extracted from this. The deeper you dig into clear and present antisemitism on the far left of the Labour movement, where I have spent all of my political life, the more evidence you unearth of how little I have done about it, the stronger I become.

But anyway, he continued: “People are attacking, but we can fight back. We can use our platforms to fight back.”

But there are those, apparently, “who cannot fight back”. “Those who have to make a choice between heating their homes or eating a meal. Between those who have to make a choice between living and not living.”

Somewhere, not very deep down in all this, is the idea, clearly expressed by Jeremy Corbyn, that he is the one on the side of the poor and the suffering, that he knows how they feel, because he has been challenged on antisemitism in the Labour Party by the Daily Mail. And that he is luckier than they are, because he has various willing attack dog bloggers to fight back for him. And not everyone else is that lucky.

That the Labour Party could and should be doing better than this is obvious. Labour really does believe that it stands on the precipice of government. Earlier John McDonnell had told them that he’d “changed his mind”, that the Tories won’t cling on to power, “because they hate each other more than they hate us”.

That’s an astute diagnosis. Jeremy Corbyn’s radical leftist politics are alive and well and offering a radical alternative. The question hoving into view, is whether they might come to decide they have outgrown the man himself.

If, by the end of this conference, Labour has not moved the electoral dial at all, it could just be possible that even the Corbynites might come to wonder whether this is as far as Corbyn can take them.