I don’t blame anyone who was in Labour’s big top in Liverpool coming away feeling enthused, having admired the speeches or having learned a great deal from the fringe events. I hope you all made new friends, took a small step forward in your careers and got suitable recreated. But few ever attend a conference; few ever hear a speech in full. Even those with a vague interest see only the edited highlights through the media’s cracked mirror.

From that perspective Labour’s Conference was dire, desperate stuff and a lost opportunity. It was a bad week for the Party and for its Leader.

What surprises me, many miles away from the hot house of conference, is that otherwise intelligent people, older and presumably wiser, seem to have forgotten much that had been learned. There is enough in the unpredictability of political life to offer a constant supply of pain without actively seeking more, but Labour in Liverpool had the feel of an already bleeding man scrabbling around for a scalpel.

It is not as if we don’t know that there is an 80% right wing press pack who see it as their task to rubbish Labour. It is not as if we don’t know that conferences are where unfortunate stories get legs and can be interpreted to suit that agenda. Creating hostages to fortune on which the press pack can feed is bad politics.

So when the Labour Leader makes remarks about ‘turning off’ popular television shows it is hardly surprising that the next day there is a tabloid headline reporting that he wishes to ‘ban’ the show in question. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t what was actually said, the damage is done.

We also know perfectly well that policy ideas rolled out at conferences or anywhere else will be picked apart and very quickly and the entrails examined..

So when shadow ministers float ideas that don’t stack up they can always be quietly dropped, discredited and dismissed, some quicker than others. But when a Leader floats notions that cannot be adequately fleshed out or supported in practical policy terms there is serious trouble ahead.

And through everything has happened in the past three decades we should by now understand that the electorate does not elected divided undisciplined rabbles to form Governments.

So when a Leader pauses in a speech, as if to invite a response, and that response underlines division and indiscipline it is without doubt a major error of judgement. Once again it is worth asking what exactly did he think was going to happen?

Much of the bad media from Labour’s conference was not down to media invention. It was down to schoolboy error. They just hadn’t thought it through properly.

But what of Ed Miliband and his Party after all this? Three fundamental points:

Mr Miliband may well say of people like me, who comment on his perceived lack of Prime Ministerial presence, that our observations are superficial and he “doesn’t give a damn”. But he is certainly an intelligent man and in his head he knows that it does matter. Perhaps he doesn’t think that he can change any of it or to do so would be false. I say he can do something about it, it isn’t a ‘given’, it is a skill that can be learned and he has the self-deprecating humour to turn to his advantage with what he cannot change. Fundamentally these are matters for his handlers – and if they can’t do it he should get some people who can.

Most fundamentally, the way policy ideas were floated out is unco-ordinated and downright amateur. This has to change before it does lasting damage. The nature of the mistakes suggests that policy notions are springing from Labour’s ivory towers without any real test of practicality being applied (and lest anyone think this is solely a Labour problem, we have seen several Conservative flagship proposals unravel over the last year for the same reason). Labour’s excuses are, or at least should be, fewer – they have all had recent experience of Government. The first question that should be asked about a policy is not ‘who will it serve’ but ‘will it actually work’ – for if the answer to the latter is ‘no’ the answer to the former is irrelevant. Nothing will convince me that the ludicrous nonsense of ‘striking off journalists’ or the tuition fees position had been subjected to this test.

Finally, it is a misjudgement to think that ‘hackgate’ changed the political landscape. Had it not been that the line was crossed by the disgraceful meddling with the Dowler family phones I very much doubt if anyone outside the Westminster hot house would have cared that much. It is another misjudgement to assume that the press, with its circulation in decline, is of limited influence. The reality is, Twitter or no Twitter, print journalism still composes the mood music for media new and old. Whether printing newspapers remains a viable business is an entirely different matter. In the rhetoric running around Labour circles it almost seems that there is a perception that the old rules no longer apply. Unfortunately they still do and in many ways new media, far from blunting the edge actually sharpens it.

In a week or two everyone apart from those who were there will have forgotten Labour’s lost conference, but the impressions of a Party divided, with an irrational view of its former leaders, with no clear direction and with a Leader who is starting to look accident prone as well as lacking an ‘X factor’ may yet linger through the Autumn – to what extent depends on what the Conservative get up to.

As ever there are lessons to be learned – quickly.