CHRIS Lloyd watches a composed Jeremy Corbyn impose his ideas on his party – but can he do enough to appeal to remainers and grassroots leavers at the same time.

JEREMY CORBYN looked more relaxed, self-confident and composed as he addressed his fourth party conference yesterday as Labour leader.

In the packed auditorium at least, this was his party and his membership, and he was speaking of his issues. The MPs who 18 months ago said his leadership was too weak to run the country – “Labour cannot win in Darlington with Jeremy as leader”, said one – are either on board in the shadow cabinet, or have fallen silent, and so the adulation, even adoration, was all his, too.

But with the wider public, Mr Corbyn has had a bruising year. Corbynmania may have peaked and the persistence of the anti-Semitism row – although its intricacies are baffling to many – has clouded some of Mr Corbyn’s lustre. Consequently, Labour is at best neck-and-neck with the Tories in the polls, even though Theresa May is the weakest prime minister of the century.

In the hope that she will fall soon, Mr Corbyn tried yesterday to present Labour as a viable alternative government in a post-austerity age, latching onto the feeling that the last decade has been desperately unfair on the ordinary person.

He laid out a programme of measures that, although eye-catching, would have been considered extremely left-wing just five years ago: nationalisation of the railway and water industries, compulsory employee share ownership, the scrapping of academy schools, a £10-an-hour minimum wage for childcare workers, and a levy on second homes (an idea considered in the Yorkshire Dales earlier this year but dropped because it was so controversial)…

Perhaps now, ten years after the financial crash caused by the deregulation of immoral global markets, Mr Corbyn’s ideas are finally coming of age. Mr Corbyn lashed out at the old “greed is good” culture, and Ed Miliband tried a similar approach in 2011 with his “producers and predators” speech. Mr Miliband failed to convince the voters, but Mr Corbyn yesterday claimed that Labour has now “caught the mood of the times” and that his policies represented “the new common sense for our time”.

Yesterday, comfortable in his role, Mr Corbyn looked far more normal than Mr Miliband ever did. Mr Corbyn didn’t bother yesterday with an excruciating, personal back story that political leaders often think makes them look human, but still he managed several genuinely moving passages. On a national level, he spoke of an MS sufferer whose benefits had been removed after 20 years forcing their carer into depression, and on an international level, he spoke of the betrayal of hope that is Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.

However, those seduced by his left wing dreams will be awoken by three thoughts. Firstly, there was no mention of balanced budgets or where the money for, as one example, a university system without tuition fees would come from.

Secondly, there was the ill-judged moment at a Momentum fringe meeting when a North-West MP, Laura Smith, was wildly applauded for calling for a national strike to force Theresa May out of office.

And thirdly, Brexit. Labour’s policy is now, officially, all things to all people. It wants Britain to get the best deal possible but it is likely to vote against Mrs May’s deal so that Britain will probably leave with a disastrous no-deal; It wants to honour the leave result of the referendum but ultimately, if Mrs May won’t hold a general election, it will call for a second referendum with ‘remain’ as an option.

Brexit spokesman Sir Keir Hardie got a standing ovation on Tuesday when he announced the new policy – unsurprising, as an eve-of-conference poll showed 86pc of party members want “a people’s vote”.

It will now be interesting to see whether the Labour leadership – including Mr Corbyn, who is a Eurosceptic at heart – really is brave enough to argue that the country will be better off remaining in the EU than leaving under the terms negotiated by Mrs May.

The vociferous pro-Brexit camp, including much of the media, will howl at the party for being traitors. More important will be the reaction in the traditional Labour heartlands in the North-East. Places like Hartlepool voted for leave by nearly 70 per cent because they were tired of the establishment taking them for granted – indeed, part of Mr Corbyn’s attraction as Labour leader was his anti-establishment air.

But now Labour has breathed life into remain as an option, will those heartlands-which-want-out feel so betrayed they turn away from the party?

IN other times, the debate after Mr Corbyn’s competent speech would be about whether he really has shifted the centre ground of British politics towards the left, and whether, after a painful decade, the people are ready for his vision of post-austerity fairness.

But in these times, Brexit overshadows everything. While it would be nice to think that people are debating whether or not Britain’s railways would be better under state control, the next few months are going to be dominated to the crashing exclusion of everything else by whatever deal Mrs May can salvage: Labour’s real test is whether it’s all things to all people policy will enable it to present a real alternative or whether it actually drives it from its grassroots.