Kelly How Labour can win – and lose

all the undermining.

It fell into three parts. First the prankster handing her the fake P45 which May accepted with stoic resignation.

Second, the coughing which reminded many of the brief tenure of Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, whose nervous throat clearing during parliamentary debates saw him dubbed Iain Duncan Cough by Private Eye.

And finally there was another bit of nostalgia this time for TV fans of Crossroads, the Midlands-based soap famed for its wobbly sets, when part of the Tory party sign collapsed.

Compared to the love-in that was the Labour conference, it showed a party at war with itself.

However Labour should not get too smug.

The Tories have been here before and following last year’s party conferences who would have thought May not Jeremy Corbyn would be the bookies favourite to be the first to go?

And stranger still, bearing in mind Labour’s civil war until the general election, if the Theresa May issue is tearing the Tory party apart, Corbyn is the glue that is holding Labour together. Remember he’s 68 and can’t go on forever - who will replace him?

Let me go all ‘Mystic Mike’ here. I thought May would be kept on to do the Brexit deal but I now suspect she’ll go before any deal is done. And very soon. A new leader will call another snap election on the premise, yet again, of getting a strong mandate this time specifically for a hard Brexit.

Labour will win - just - and pick up the poisoned chalice and plough ahead with its ‘soft Brexit’ policy faced by a Tory party reinvigorated by an anti Europe stance with its preferred ‘hard Brexit’ approach.

One of Corbyn’s shortcomings - as a party leader not as a person - is his inability to speak convincingly of a policy he is not, well, convinced about. Lying, in old money. Does he have Tony Blair’s phone number for tips? Even Charlie Mullins has had enough