TOMORROW afternoon, at Labour’s annual conference in Brighton, Jeremy Corbyn will take to the stage with a twinkle in his eye and a playful smile on his lips to explain why he should be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He will come across as reasonable and kindly. He’ll probably have some half-decent jokes. He will definitely feel your pain. He will get angry at all the right people. He will receive an enthusiastic and prolonged standing ovation.

He will, in other words, play the part of an orthodox party leader – like, say, Tony Blair. Delivering a long speech to a vast hall of people while live on TV is not a job for the faint-hearted amateur. It requires poise, polish, self-confidence, a flair for the theatrical. It is work, in short, for a professional politician.

This is precisely what Mr Corbyn has become over the past two years. He has rendered redundant the cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks – the hairy, grouchy, 66-year-old no-hoper who stumbled wide-eyed into the leadership in 2015 has shape-shifted into slick public operator and, for some, messiah. Credit where it’s due: no one, including Mr Corbyn, thought he had it in him.

There’s another link to Mr Blair. The control freakery surrounding this year’s conference is every bit as great as that employed by New Labour at its zenith. The Corbynites have seized not just the means of production, but the entire production itself – backstage, onstage, audience, front of house, the lot. The country’s most successful Labour politicians, London Mayor Sadiq Khan and Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham – neither friends of Jeremy – were blocked from speaking. Following pressure, Mr Khan secured a late exemption; Mr Burnham will have to sit with the plebs while the big slots are reserved for Mr Corbyn and his closest allies Diane Abbott, John McDonnell and Emily Thornberry.

There will, astonishingly, be no debate and vote on Brexit – which, given the pro-EU make-up of Labour members, risked embarrassment for the passionately Eurosceptic leadership. The increasingly influential Momentum movement created to tighten the hard Left’s grip on the party ensured its members chose other subjects for discussion instead. This is of a piece with a recent change to Labour’s internal rules that cut from 15 per cent to 10 per cent the number of nominations needed from MPs and MEPs for a leadership nomination, thus making it easier for a Corbyn supporter to succeed him. Threats of mandatory reselection of MPs linger, and Momentum has stuffed constituency parties in an attempt to edge out any remaining refuseniks. In all, it amounts to a painstakingly-planned, immensely successful entryist coup. It has stolen the Labour Party.

Does this worry you? Or have you succumbed to the strange glamour that has come upon parts of the land: that Mr Corbyn’s Labour offers a decent, more honest, innovatively radical yet credible alternative to the governing orthodoxy?

Have you made your peace with – or do you in fact thrill to – the idea of the United Kingdom, its economy and its relationships being run by Prime Minister Corbyn, Chancellor McDonnell and their gaunt strategist Seamus Milne? In the end, will it really prove so very easy for these hardline retreads to take over a country? Are we so forgetful, so easily duped, quite so stupid?

If you’re genuinely hard Left, there’s nothing I can or would do for you. But if you’re a thoughtful, measured sort who has been taken in by Mr Corbyn’s learned affability and surprise popularity, who’s intrigued by his proposed new model society, give yourself a hard shake. Then go and read up on the consequences of Marxist economics and socialist experimentation in practice from Russia in 1917 to modern-day Venezuela. If you’re still a fan after that, I’ll meet you at the Queensferry Crossing, where there’s a shiny new bridge I’d like to sell you.

The disturbing success of the far-right AfD in the weekend’s German election is only the latest evidence that the fringes are cleverly manipulating the uncertainties of our times. Immigration, generational inequality, turbo-capitalism and globalisation have all created fractures that the populists are rushing to exploit. Be those populists on the far left or far right, they arrive with solutions painted in primary colours – heavily restrict immigration, leave the EU, British jobs for British workers, scrap tuition fees, introduce wage caps, nationalise everything. It’s all so simple.

Except it’s not, of course. Understand this: every one of those populists has an ulterior motive considerably darker than the tail feathers they allow to be seen in public. It doesn’t take much to figure out where AfD is coming from. Nor is it much of a stretch for anyone with a brain to figure out what the Corbynites want. If enough of us fall for the surface display of compassion, the angsty, wrinkled brow at the working conditions of nurses and teachers, the righteous anger at the existence of food banks, we will vote them into power. Disillusionment with this pathetic Tory Government being what it is, this is a plausible scenario.

That is where the hard Left’s work really begins. Mr Corbyn will sit atop it all, smiling in benediction. Mr Milne, a Winchester and Oxford-educated Stalin apologist, will begin to switch our foreign policy posture away from our traditional allies and towards the Russian and Arab demagogues of whom he is so fond – he once wrote “for all its brutalities and failures, communism in the Soviet Union, eastern Europe and elsewhere delivered rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality”. Mr McDonnell, one of the most sinister men ever to sit in parliament, will begin with a few popular nationalisations – probably rail and water, before moving onto energy and, as he revealed on the Today programme yesterday morning, construction. Then he will go further. Taxes will go up and up. The wealth-creating private sector will be cowed. The trade unions will be empowered and emboldened. Protectionism will return. Resistance will be overrode, gently at first, then not so gently. This is how it will happen. This is how it always happens.

In truth, the hard Left doesn’t give a fig about people. It cares about ideology and systems. The historian and poet Robert Conquest nailed them long ago:

There was an old bastard named Lenin/ Who did two or three million men in./That’s a lot to have done in/ But where he did one in/That old bastard Stalin did ten in.