Mick Hartley

Camilla Long, in the Sunday Times [£], on fine form as she visits the Labour Party conference to witness the election of the Great Leader:

I don’t seriously believe Corbyn ever thought he would lose, from the moment Angela Eagle became the first candidate to oppose him. Unfortunately Eagle not only chose the tone and colours of a Tampax commercial to launch her campaign but timed her lift-off right at the moment Andrea “Car Shoes” Leadsom was crashing noisily to earth in the Tory race.

Footage of Eagle, who looks as if she has to be told whether an escalator is going up or down, asking for “Nick Robinson? Robert Peston?” was the most forlorn political moment of the year. She doesn’t seem to be here celebrating now.

I have come to Liverpool because I haven’t seen Corbyn since he won this time last year. It is amazing how the sustained wearing of a decent suit can break a man. Corbyn not only seems fatter, fleshier and more intensely beard-scaped but appears to have a Sky News tan. The shade is best described as “forced shortbread” after the interview in which he told Mumsnetters he was “totally anti-sugar on health grounds, so eat very few biscuits, but if I’m forced to accept one, it’s always a pleasure to have a shortbread”.

Monday’s biscuit incident highlighted the single most depressing thing we’ve learnt about Corbyn in 12 months: the utterly miserable limits of his political thought. He only ever asks himself one question: can I be anti this? And the answer is always yes, even biscuits….

Corbyn gives a small wave, which I take as a sign that his goons must now execute Smith. He then begins an impromptu speech. I say impromptu because there is no way he has given it any thought — not even now he is speaking. He starts juddering, nonsensical sentences, with no idea of how he will finish them. How can someone be both inept and sly?

After a few stabs at Theresa May, he glances down at his lieutenants. Most of them are union bosses in leather jackets….

I’m not worried about the people at the conference: the leather queens, the suited Welshmen, the male councillors who look like French lesbians. I’m worried by its fragility, the pathetic, thin, cultish atmosphere. The way anyone remotely connected to Corbyn rips through it, passing instantly for a megastar.

At the welcome desk, where everyone has been waiting hours to pick up our passes, several of his inner circle sweep imperiously to the front of the queue. Diane Abbott barges in right in front of me, only pausing momentarily as her assistant unconvincingly lines up some stooge who they pretend has been “saving Diane’s place”. Abbott is spirited off in a third of the time it takes everyone else. Some pigs really are more equal than others.