Ed Miliband seems to be all for marriage, so how come he’s too busy for one of his own?

Look, I get it.

Look, I get it. I know how it is. You’ve got a lot on. You’re overdue a haircut, your parking permit is about to run out, and you got something from the tax man the other day, which you wrote a phone number on and took to work, and brought home again without actually reading, and put… where? You’ve been meaning to take your dark grey suit to the dry-cleaners for months now, actually months, but you keep accidentally taking the light grey one instead, which means that although the dark one is getting ever stiffer and shinier and more aromatic, somehow, of raisins, you still keep having to wear it anyway because the light one, despite being really quite extraordinarily clean — gleaming, eat your dinner off it — doesn’t actually fit.

You’d go to the gym, but when? It’s the job. You go in, you work, you come home, you think about work, and the harder you work, the less likely you are to remember to do all those little vital everyday chores of life, such as getting married, registering the birth of your child, and remarking to your brother, at some point in your life thus far, that you, too, would like to be prime minister. Oh Ed. What a life.

‘We will be getting married at some point,’ says the new leader of Not New Labour, of his partner Justine Thornton. And in terms of marriage per se, well, whatever. Get married, don’t get married, nobody really cares anymore. Even Richard Littlejohn struggled to, in the Daily Mail earlier this week, and you could tell he was really trying. Only, Miliband doesn’t seem to be anti-marriage, or even marriage-neutral. He seems to be all for marriage, but just hasn’t got around to it. ‘We will be getting married at some point.’ So she’s not just his partner, like everyone says. She’s also his fiancée. Or hasn’t he got around to telling her that, either?

Ed, mate, Camden registry office is just down the road. That’s where I went. It takes about seven minutes to get married. Registering your son’s birth would add on another, what, four-ish? And they’re open seven days a week. ‘The Copenhagen environmental summit got in the way,’ he has gibbered, of late. ‘Then there was a general election, and now the leadership election.’ I know, I know, you’ve been terribly busy. But it’s hardly going to get easier now, is it? Get a grip, man, for God’s sake.

He looked sick when he won, didn’t he? Like he could throw up, right there and then, onto Andy Burnham’s shoes. And you think about the waffling chaos of his domestic life, and you wonder. Had he actually thought about what it would be like if he won? Had he ever discussed it with his brother? Or did they all keep meaning to, but just never quite get around to it? And if so, who is to say that in power he’d be any different? ‘I fully intend to leave Afghanistan,’ he could say, ‘and renew Trident, and cut the deficit and do something about Iran. Any day now. But I’ve got a verruca. I’ve got dry-cleaning. I need a haircut. Oh Christ, look, I’ve just got a lot on.’

Last year I went to the Forbidden City, in Beijing. For hundreds of years people outside didn’t go in, and people inside didn’t go out. You could live on one side your whole life, and never know anything about life on the other. ‘Reminds me of something,’ I thought, when I was there, and only this week have I realised what that something was. It was modern party conferences.

Once, they happened in distant, oddball coastal cities, and nobody cared. Such places only exist because of the various circuses which pass through, and the locals — who tend to be either asylum-seekers who live in B&Bs, or Express-reading, gollywog-hugging maniacs — have learned to live with it. One week it was the Liberal Democrats, the next the British Terrapin Foundation. One week Ukip, the next Mormons Against Psoriasis. Plus ça change.

Now, though, party conferences have to happen in modern, vibrant cities, as a badge of party pride. It’s weird, and it’s counter-productive. In Liverpool it wasn’t so bad, because the Lib Dems were exiled to the riverside conference centre, and the whole thing just felt like a subdued version of that enormous rave the other month, where the Germans packed all those kids into a suburban carpark. In Manchester, though, the Labour conference is like a Green Zone. Why even have it here? What’s the point?

‘Last week,’ your average Mancunian must think, ‘my city was my own. This week, I can’t drive from one end to the other. A vast army of braying pricks in suits are barricaded into the middle, and only venture out to scurry to their hotels, looking afraid. Last week, Wetherspoons was just Wetherspoons. This week it is LGBT Animal Rights Karaoke.’

Obviously, provincial engagement is a fine thing. But is this really the way?

Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.