Andy McSmith's Diary: Jeremy Corbyn stays laid back about his speech, and its tendency to recycle ideas

Jeremy Corbyn’s advisers must – or should – have known that it would take no time at all before it became known that a chunk of his conference speech was taken word for word from a blog posted four years ago by the journalist Richard Heller. Ironically, they could have used another of Heller’s ideas last week, without running into any difficulty at all – and a very good idea it was too.

Heller, who was a Labour special adviser in the 1980s, was one of the 40,000 who sent in ideas for questions Corbyn could ask at his first Prime Minister’s Questions. His suggestion was that Corbyn should point out that though he did not vote against the Iraq war in 2003, David Cameron did vote in favour of it, and then invite the Prime Minister to explain how either the UK or the Middle East was better off as a result of that war. Hearing Cameron try to answer that one would have been a joy.

Snub to steelworkers

“We stand with the people on Teesside fighting for their jobs, their industry and their community,” Corbyn promised in his speech. He was wildly applauded. So was Brian Dennis, a steelworker from Redcar, a town facing economic desolation because of the loss of its steelworks.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the big unions were doing deals about who would hold seats on Labour’s national executive in the coming year. Community, successor to the Iron and Steel Trades Confederation, has always been a bulwark of the right wing of the TUC. It belonged to the Gordon Brown era rather than the brave world of Labour in opposition. The Bakers’ Union is more in tune with Corbyn, though they are behind in paying their affiliation. So just as the steelworkers face their biggest crisis in a generation, their representative, Susan Lewis, has been quietly bumped off the NEC by the combined block votes of the left-wing unions, and replaced by a baker.

“They have given Brian a standing ovation, then they kick him in the balls,” one angry union representative told me. “Given what has happened on Teesside in the last couple of days, it’s just crass. It’s hugely political. We believe in negotiation and dealing with whoever we have to deal with. If that makes you a ‘moderate’ – fine: I’m pretty relaxed about that.”

Super-chilled leader

That relaxed style that Corbyn brings to his new role continued even as the prospect of having to deliver his first leader’s speech drew ever closer. At 9.30 in the morning, he was spotted in the corridors of Brighton’s Hilton Hotel in a t-shirt, shorts and flip-flops. “He was super-relaxed, not at all like a man with a conference speech to deliver. He was chilled,” said an eye-witness.