Jeremy Corbyn’s conference speech challenge

Jeremy Corbyn has, so far, had a reasonably good conference. Nothing has gone noticeably wrong. There have been no stand-up rows, no fights in the fringes, no heckling in the hall. And the atmosphere has been far better than Labour’s awful autumn conference last year, where everyone was full of gloom when the party was a few points ahead in the polls.

But the Labour conference was still going to plan at this point last year, albeit in a moribund way. Ed Miliband hadn’t delivered his speech yet, and he therefore hadn’t forgotten to mention the deficit (the speech was poor, too, but the overall quality was quickly eclipsed by the discovery of his omission). So though Corbyn has had good interviews and his frontbenchers have stuck by him and so on, all this could evaporate if he gives a bad speech.

Corbyn’s long-term challenge is to appear Prime Ministerial.