A confession: I do not really ‘get’ conference speeches. Like dubstep, it seems to mean a lot to a great number of people, but it’s all just noise to me. It seems to me, though, that the best guide to how much – or how little – it all meant isn’t in how we felt in the hall or what the papers said before or after, but in what’s going on in Manchester.

Not because you’ll see a formidable war machine cranking into gear, or the brutal, pitiless dismantling of Ed Miliband and all his works. The reality of Tory party conference this year is a rather sad gathering of the eccentric and the elderly, all hopelessly riven about whether or not they should form pacts with a party that loathes them, their leadership and a considerable chunk of their party platform. No, it’s not what the Conservatives are doing up north that should worry Labour; it’s how little of that activity is actually breaking out into the wider world.

I am politically engaged to a perhaps unreasonable extent, and I have only a vague idea that yesterday George Osborne gave a speech about something – logic suggests it was the economy – and announced something nasty and self-defeating and called it ‘welfare reform’. Also maybe the marriage tax allowance got announced or introduced. Or possibly it was pre-announced on Sunday but in fact has yet to be announced-announced. And I’m not, if I’m 100 per cent honest, entirely sure whether or not this is one of those policies that is happening now, or one of those policies that David Cameron would have got away with if it hadn’t been for those pesky Cleggs, like repealing the Human Rights Act and privatising every child of woman born.

The kicker is, these guys are actually in government, so lord knows what, if anything, registered of what we got up to last week. Enough noise clearly got out for Labour to enjoy a bump in the polls, but that happened last year, and we still went into the conference season with Ed facing a speech that was billed as ‘make or break’. Again.

The good news is, when the chips are down, Ed Miliband doesn’t let us down. He had to give a fantastic speech in 2012, and he did. He had to give a brilliant speech in 2013, and he did. The trouble is that, after those speeches, the party machine, like Bagpuss, fell back into an unproductive slumber. Showstopping speeches, though, quickly fall prey to the law of diminishing returns. In 2012, the Labour lead shot up to 42 per cent. In 2013, it shot up to 41 per cent. Meanwhile, one-fifth of Labour voters think that the party is making promises it can’t afford and still aren’t convinced that Ed is ready to be prime minister, and 11 months of quietude followed by 60 minutes of dazzling oratory won’t change that. Yes, an aristocratic, benefit-bashing, single-mother-taxing, hyphen-neglecting Tory party is hardly likely to win a majority either, but a hung parliament puts the next government in the hands of Nick Clegg, who is hardly a natural midwife to a left-leaning administration.

To avoid repeating the past, Labour must instead repeat itself. People who watch the news over their tea or have the radio on in the morning are, for the most part, not hanging on every word: that’s why Tony Blair used the word ‘new’ 35 times in his 1994 conference speech and it’s the same reason that Ed used the phrase ‘Britain can do better’ 17 times. That’s the beginning of a sustained critique of the weaknesses of ‘Cameroonism’ in all its forms, but it needs to find a positive echo: a six-word sentence about what Labour would do differently that needs to find its way into every Labour statement from now until election day, because if Labour finds itself going into the 2014 conference season expecting Ed Miliband to walk on water – again – it could end 2015 under water.

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Stephen Bush writes a weekly column for Progress, the Tuesday review, and tweets @stephenkb