Those old enough to remember will recall that there were basically two approaches. You could simply bash the bejesus out of the buttons that controlled the flippers, not worrying too much about what the silver ball hit as long as it hit something, randomly clocking up points in the process. Or you could play things more strategically, working out which bits of the table offered the most points and, using the flippers sparingly and with rather more precision, try to ping the ball in the right direction.

On balance, the second approach may have produced less frenetic fun but it was nearly always more effective: ultimately, after all, you got to play longer and you tended to score more points — sometimes even enough to earn a replay.

And so it is with party leader’s conference speeches. Less can often be more. When you’re on the attack, aim for laconic rather than histrionic. And when you’re setting out your own stall, pointing to just a few special offers and hinting at more to come beats trying to leave your listeners spoiled for choice.

The model for me (at least for a Labour leader) will always be John Smith in Blackpool in 1992, making a speech to a party that was demoralised after its fourth defeat in a row yet just beginning to wonder whether, in the light of the chaos and incompetence displayed by the Major government in the days leading up to the Conference, the Tories were really as unbeatable as everyone had assumed.

The prospect facing Keir Starmer, another former lawyer, as he stood up to address the faithful (and the not-so-faithful) was, then, far from unprecedented.

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So did he deliver? Well, maybe not totally. But, to be fair, it was far from the kind of epic fail that Boris Johnson and the Corbynite stay-behinds who did their best to heckle “their” leader were no doubt hoping for. And it may even have left some of those with no skin in the game but whose expectations were low (especially after the pasting Starmer’s 14,000-word magnum opus got from the cognoscenti), pleasantly surprised.

Personality — at least with a big P — remains a problem. As a courtroom lawyer, Starmer, unlike Smith, was never the kind of performer who has the jury eating out of his hands and the audience hanging on his every word. As a politician, nothing’s changed. I’ve never seen him on the dance floor but, as an orator, he has no sense of rhythm. Or, indeed, of tone. A party caricatured as preachy and po-faced could really do with a leader who doesn’t always sound quite so plaintive. I’ve no idea if someone on his staff has sat him down and told him he desperately needs to get some voice coaching, but they should do. After all, it never did Margaret Thatcher any harm.

Instead, Team Keir is clearly still convinced that there’s mileage in marketing their man as the antithesis to Boris — the responsible ying to the PM’s frivolous yang, the guy whose approach (as he himself, like some kind of Checkatrade-approved plumber, put it) is “Down to earth. Working out what’s wrong. Fixing it.”

Hence all the stuff about the good deeds Starmer was doing as a civil rights advocate and a prosecutor while Johnson was fannying around phoning in trivial blah, blah, blah for the Telegraph — all of which also served as a useful reminder to a public that he’s had a job that actually means something outside politics.

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It sort of works — but even with a few jokes thrown in (of which the early one comparing hecklers with Tory MPs at PMQs was by far the best, and the best-delivered) — I’m still not sure that’s enough. To take an example, “Level up? You can’t even fill up” actually had the potential to be what passes in politics (a low bar, I admit) as a killer put-down. Coming out of Sir Keir’s mouth, however, it sounded a little leaden and contrived. Likewise, the more assertive and pleasingly alliterative “Get a grip or get out of the way.”

That said, to those who complain that we already know what Starmer got up to before going into politics, it’s worth saying (yet again) that the majority of people out there probably don’t. The same goes for him telling us (yet again) that his dad was a toolmaker and his mum was a nurse. How (and why), for instance, does anyone think so many people in London know that Sadiq Khan’s dad was a bus-driver?

Starmer’s family background shtick did tee up a peroration (“Work. Care. Equality. Security. These are the tools of my trade. And with them I will go to work.”) that was beautifully-crafted for television news. And those of us who complained about how long he was talking for as we watched live need to remember that those clips are all that sensible people (who weren’t) will ever hear.

The sheer length of the speech wasn’t entirely accidental, of course. By affording Starmer space to remind activists of his pukka-working class and NHS background, it made it harder for Labour’s Momentumite irreconcilables to lay into him in the hall — as did asking the always admirable Dame Doreen Lawrence to do his intro. They still had a damn good go, startling those in the broadcast media who, for some strange reason, think Starmer’s the first Labour leader to face a tough crowd — and so made it an integral (but totally disproportionate) part of their packages for the evening and morning news programmes.

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Still, Starmer’s long address also gave him the chance to kick the Corbynites where it really hurts by promising never to “go into an election with a manifesto that is not a serious plan for government” and (heresy of heresies) to “offer the Conservative party a lesson in levelling up” by listing (to one of the most genuinely striking standing ovations he received) the achievements of the last Labour government — one run by politicians who, like him, believed in “changing lives” rather than simply “shouting slogans”.

The ninety-minute speech also gave Starmer plenty of time to share some eye-catching (if not always entirely persuasive) policies on crime, state education and climate change — future-facing, focus-grouped to be voter-friendly and a retort to those who would otherwise bound to have banged on about a lack of “substance”.

To those of us watching for whom less is more, there was probably too much in there. But to those for whom “more is more” — those who might have taken the first, more frenetic approach to playing pinball down in Brighton all those years ago — that won’t have been a problem.

I’d be prepared to bet that Starmer (who’s three years older than me and so must occasionally have played when he was younger, too) would naturally prefer the second, more careful approach to the game. But this year he tried both. Whether that means he’s a wizard or whether there has to be a twist, we’ll soon find out.

Sir Keir Starmer, from autocue:

Comrade delegates. Fellow Knights of the Realm. Common folk. Ladies. Gentlemen. Old, young, happy, sad. People with an important sexual or gender disposition we absolutely need to know about. Everybody in this fantastic, broad, inclusive, tolerant, united, forward-looking, secular church of ours – thanks for another brilliant Conference. Wow. Amazing. No, thank you.

I have a very important announcement to make. But first I ask Conference for your forbearance as I attempt the customary humorous preamble. Ha ha. Yes. Yeah.

Older comrade delegates may remember the American pop songster Roger Miller. And his fantastic hit record, England Swings. Way back in the 1960s, when the internet was still only science fiction. You madam — in the front row there. You remember him, I bet. You look as though you were a bit of a swinger yourself, eh! Oh, it’s Harriet Harman. I rest my case! As I used to say! Fantastic.

“Ingerland swings…” went the refrain. “Like a pendulum do”. Ingerland swings. Like a pendulum do. And in post-war Britain, politics did indeed swing like a pendulum do. The Tories got in for a couple of terms, people got bored with them, voted us in and so on ad infinitum. Well, comrade delegates. Look where we are now. The political pendulum swings still. It do, it does. But entirely within the Labour Party. The Government blunders from strength to strength, stumbling towards their goal of running a one-party state. Meanwhile, Labour’s trapped, padding from left to right and back again like a mangy old tiger in some unremembered cage. I don’t know if you’ve seen that Netflix series about a zookeeper guy called Joe Exotic, fantastic watch, really takes your mind off things.

But seriously, again. Apart from the BBC, no institution does self-loathing quite like the Labour Party Conference does it, comrade delegates? Oh, we all pretended as usual to enjoy a coming-together, a renewal of purpose. Statements were made and listened to solemnly. Consensus was declared, as is customary, on the badness and wrongness of Toryism. Speakers have emphasised Labour’s unique contract with working people. Now everything will be packed up for another year, nothing will have changed, and that’s the bloody problem. Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?

But things have to change. That’s why I have prepared some KEYWORDS to illustrate my speech. They are: SLOGAN, SEIZURE, MILITARY COUP, TWITTER, NET ZERO, UNIONS, ELECTORAL COLLEGE and NEW LEADERSHIP. Hey, guy there in the raspberry beret — you get it! Full disclosure, I’ve had two gins and tonic to stiffen the sinews, come on, it’s showtime!

OK firstly, comrade delegates: SLOGAN. This year’s slogan — A New Leadership — is pretty good. On one level — here I am, not Jeremy Corbyn, fantastic! Sort of winning already. Also, on another level, Labour can offer the leadership the country isn’t getting from Mr Tumble at No 10. It’s also good on a meta-level, we’ll come to that later.

Comrades, I’d like to talk about SEIZURE. I’m not having one, I’m advocating one ha ha, all right now, settle down. I’m proposing a mass seizure of assets that should never have left public ownership in the first bloody place. Now I’m guessing from that noise, like the air being squashed out of 1,000 paddling pools, that you’re shocked. Well tough halloumi because it’s time we embraced SOCIALISM once again. “Oh but why are you abandoning centrist policies, which must be the way forward because they always have been, Sir Keir?” you whine, like abandoned puppies. Yeah, well I’m sorry. That “essay” I wrote for the Fabians about tiptoeing along the middle of the road. I’ve had a major rethink. I have marked that essay “D minus, see self”. I have had a word with self. The new Me begins now.

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Fact: young people love socialism. They get it. They can see what Vulture Capitalism’s doing to the world and they know that Disaster Socialism is the only way forward. Why should they be denied a stake in their own future when THE FUTURE IS SOCIALIST my gasping comrade delegates! We watched while buy-to-let landlords bought right-to-buy council houses and turned them into rent-to-frack human juicers. We need rent controls and affordable housing. “Deal”, as we say in Shadow Cabinet.

Here’s a puzzle — what’s the point of having privatised railways and bunging them more than £7 billion a year in subsidies? If the French state, the German state, the bloody Dutch state can own our railways, so can OUR state. Same with all the energy companies and the NHS. Oh dear, shareholders, your luck can go up or down, read the small print, we’re having the LOT back, cost price, sling your hook. “Oh but how are we to achieve this legally, Sir Keir?” I hear you mewl like neurotic kittens. Listen, I worked my way up from conveyancing solicitor to Director of Public Prosecutions, leave the paperwork to ME!

“COUP”. It’s an ugly word, and God knows I hope it doesn’t come to it. But I had some Generals round for a barbecue last month and let me tell you they are HARD for regime change. One of them told me in confidence that they’d cheerfully invade the Cotswolds if it meant the end of “Commander-in-Chief Fuckjumbo and that shower of arriviste shits”. His words, not mine.

Talking of posh, I’m seriously pissed off with the media, who keep unhelpfully calling me “Sir Keir”. Sir Keir doesn’t sound like the sort of guy who’d keep the Red Flag flying anywhere, does he? It’s a bit much when the leader of the Labour Party sounds more aristo than Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. What’s particularly unfair is that I notice more and more journalists, finally tiring of our capricious, dithering arsehole of a prime minister, have started calling him by his surname rather than his clown name. I think I’d be much more appealing as “Starmer”. Imagining an exclamation mark after that. “Starmer!”, sort of like a white “Shaft!” Lady over there to my right, you’d like that too, am I right? Ha ha, no offence love, just banter.

Talking of which, can we stop trying to triangulate policy positions by asking “What Would Twitter Say?” Firstly, who cares what Twitter says? Secondly, we all know what Twitter says, which is “FUCK YOU, BE KIND!” Comrade influencers — social media is not an important forum for the exchange of ideas. It is a mosh pit. It is a primal therapy screaming room. It is a distraction. When I first came into politics, people would stare out of the window or have a cigarette to break up the monotony of their day. Now they scroll through Twitter to find out who’s said hurtful words to whom. Who has “liked” the wrong “tweet”. Can you hear how infantile that sounds? “Hashtag I Stand With…”? NO. Stop “standing”, comrades! You CLAP are CLAP not CLAP in CLAP fucking CLAP HAMILTON! Log off, comrades. Twitter is a bourgeois prison of the mind.

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What’s next? Ah yes: ELECTORAL COLLEGE. All that “we’re changing the rules about how we elect a leader”. Soz, just winding up the crypto-Stalinists. As usual. Ha ha Corbyn you peevish, brittle old git. Next…er, NET ZERO. A Green Deal for a Green Britain. Green Jobs for Green Industry. Green Power to a Green People. A Green Future with a Green Economy. Delegate comrades, are we willing to turn Green Platitudes into a Green Reality? Only green time will greenly tell…

Ah yes. THE UNIONS. Protection of workers’ rights has never been more important. OK, maybe it has. But frankly the Starmerist wing of the Party, which has been headed by me, should shut up now and set about strengthening the power of the unions. Closed shops, lightning strikes, bring it on. Oh, and let’s have Clause 4 back, see how Lord Blair of Baghdad likes THAT. If the entire country’s unionised, what could possibly go wrong? In return, unions would be obliged to take their stupid dinosaur heads out of their arses, so fingers crossed. Why do I feel so giddy, comrade delegates? It’s not just the gin.

I’M STANDING DOWN. Oh that paddling pool noise again. Yeah, happy now? I won’t wait until we’re “in power”. I’ll shuffle off this afternoon, so we’ve actually got a shot at being in power. Comrade delegates, I was always only ever a caretaker leader. We just needed a breather after the Corbyn Experiment. Time to hang up my brown coat. Time for a new broom. I don’t want to overstay my welcome, and the earlier I go the more noble I seem. Anyway, I’ve got a LOT of Seizure Paperwork to tackle. So without further ado comrades, I’d like to hand over to Deputy Leader Ange Rayner. Cheers, yes please, ice and a slice love!

Sir Keir Starmer leaves the stage. Ms Angela Rayner addressing Conference:

All right? Yeah, totally endorse what Starmo’s just said there, let’s crack on. You can see what it says on the wall behind, “A NEW LEADERSHIP”, here we go then.  Comrade delegates, this is the 21st Century right? Labour has never had a woman leader yeah? Let’s correct that now. Proposal: make the contest for a new leader a women-only shortlist. All those in favour gasp. Motion carried. All are welcome to put themselves forward but don’t get me wrong. One of my best mates ever is Rebecca Long-Bailey, but we’ll never get in if we’re led by that pillock, bless her, with her tiny little face in her mam’s make-up. I, Ange Rayner, am ideal, as I can totally unite the party. Look at my credentials, Conference. Northern, working class, free school meals, pregnant at 16, my life saved by a Sure Start Centre. Remember what administration brought those in? Exactly. I owe a LOT to the Blair years. I speak as I find. Remember how the Tories sneered at my lack of education? Remember? I do. Well now Nadine Dorries — NADINE DORRIES — is Culture Secretary.

Comrade delegates, I commend all this to Conference, here’s to a new beginning, a new leadership, Green Socialism, let me lead us into battle and twat the Tories. Cheers.

LARP, or live action role-playing, is an offshoot of the fantasy roleplaying subculture. It involves dressing up in costume and acting out a fantasy-fiction game narrative in real time and space, sometimes over several days. A witty friend once characterised the experience as something akin to ‘cross-country pantomime’.

Thanks to lockdown, no one’s LARPing this year — at least not in the cross-country pantomime sense. But the word ‘LARP’ has escaped into the wild: far from being the preserve of fantasy fans, I’ve noticed it appearing with increasing frequency in political discourse.

When riot police finally pushed activists out of the Chapel Hill Autonomous Zone following the murder of one joyriding teenager and serious wounding of another by CHAZ ‘security’, resistance to the advancing riot shields was so paltry it prompted contemptuous accusations of ‘revolutionary larping’. Weird Christian Twitter (it’s a thing) hosts arguments where people are accused of larping more traditionalist theologies than they truly espouse. Still further out on the fringes, the QAnon conspiracy rabbit hole (don’t go there) is fiercely defended by its True Believers against accusations that it is, in fact, a bunch of people LARPing.

Around the time my friends were discovering LARP, I got into LARP’s Very Online cousin, Alternate Reality Gaming (ARGs). An artefact of the age before Facebook and Twitter colonised most of the internet, ARGs are a hybrid of online treasure hunt, mystery story, and live-action immersive theatre. The first mass-participation ARG was a promotional stunt for the 2001 film AI, and featured a series of fiendish clues for participants to crack and follow, which unlocked further elements of story including live-action segments.

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For a moment in the mid-Noughties, ARGs looked like the future of storytelling. The idea of internet communities over-writing stable systems of meaning with playful new narratives that danced back and forth between the web and real world felt refreshing and subversive. With hindsight, though, the phenomenon was just a more-than-usually-creative moment in a widespread unmooring of reality that’s been under way for decades.

It’s not all the fault of the internet. In 1955, the philosopher J L Austin developed a theory of ‘performative’ language: that is, language that does something to reality in the act of being spoken. ‘I pronounce you man and wife’ is an example of performative speech — words that effect change through the act of being spoken.

Then, in 1993, the queer theorist Judith Butler borrowed the concept of ‘performative’ language wholesale and applied it to sex and gender, arguing that the identities ‘man’ and ‘woman’ — along with the bodies and biologies associated with those identities — are performative. In taking these roles on, Butler claimed, we make them real.

While these ideas pre-date mass adoption of the internet, the notion that we participate in creating our own realities has been wildly accelerated by social media. Online, it’s easy to get the impression that we can reinvent ourselves entirely, independent of our bodies or other dull ‘meatspace’ constraints. Unsurprisingly, Butler’s conception of sex and gender as performance has long since escaped the petri dish of academia and, like the concept of LARPing, is evolving rapidly in the wild.

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Strikingly, the word ‘performative’ has also mutated. Today, it isn’t used as Butler did, to mean “a performance that shapes reality”, but the opposite: an insincere performance for social kudos. So, for example, celebrity endorsements of social justice orthodoxies are often accused of being ‘performative’. It means much the same as ‘larping’, but with an added payload of cynicism. So where ‘LARPing’ means “playacting at something you wish you were”, ‘performative’ means “playacting at something you don’t really believe”.

Meanwhile, the LARP is no longer confined to cheery camping trips accessorised with pretend armour. Back in the noughties, online communities refactoring reality to fit a fantasy storyline felt like a fun game, but as I stare into the sucking void of the QAnon conspiracy, that perspective now seems hopelessly naïve. It’s not a game today: it’s how we do politics.

Liberal commentators spend a great deal of energy trying to explain why this is bad. Countless writers ‘fact-check’ Trump’s bloviations, seemingly unaware that from the perspective of reality-as-ARG, the fact that Trump is lying doesn’t matter. Nor does it really matter whether QAnon is real or not. Reality is, to a great extent, beside the point.

Laurie Penny got closer to the truth in this 2018 piece, where she characterises the very notion of a ‘marketplace of ideas’ as being a kind of LARP: “a Classical fever-dream of a society where pedigreed intellectuals freely exchange ideas in front of a respectful audience”. The reality, she argues, is that this ‘marketplace of ideas’ is less free, rational exchange than dick-swinging theatre.

Those who like to imagine this pessimistic perspective is new, wholly the fault of the Orange Man (or perhaps Facebook), should recall the words of an unnamed aide to George W Bush, quoted in 2004 on the relationship between facts, reality and the military invasion of Iraq:

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The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works any more,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Though his approach was less overtly hubristic, Tony Blair’s embrace of spin reflected a similar belief in his own ability to manipulate public narratives. ‘Political communications’ has only grown in significance since those days, and taken a self-referential turn. Today it’s as common for commentators to criticise a politician for performing badly at a presser — for poor-quality larping, or bad theatre in Penny’s formulation — as for saying things that are immoral or factually wrong.

Donald Trump is distinct from George W Bush not so much in disdaining facts as in lacking the religious conviction Bush deployed to fill in the gaps left behind by their disregard. But both, in different ways, embodied or embody the idea that what you believe is what is. If you LARP hard enough, this view says, your larp will come true.

Boris Johnson’s administration has something of the same cavalier attitude to the relationship between facts and rhetoric. To date, the handling of coronavirus has routinely over-promised and under-delivered, while seeming indifferent to the disorienting effect on public life of a string of announcements only very loosely tethered to everyday experience.

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It’s not a coincidence that this larpification of politics has evolved in tandem with a public fixation on ‘evidence-based policy’. The political polarity of absolute LARP — blatant political lying — and absolute insistence on evidence are two sides of the same loss of faith in a common understanding of reality.

If you’re not convinced, consider SAGE, the government’s scientific advisory committee. Then consider ‘Independent SAGE’, a kind of counter-SAGE comprising scientists every bit as eminent as those on SAGE. This august body produces its own carefully evidence-based reports, which are then used as a foundation from which to disagree with whatever positions the Tories choose to adopt from official SAGE.

Who do we believe? That’s politics. If the Brexit debate hadn’t already killed your faith in ‘the evidence’, the competing claims of SAGE and counter-SAGE should be the death-blow. There is no dispassionate foundation of facts we can deploy to take the politics out of political decisions. The original LARPers might have a fun weekend, then pack up and go back to their normal lives; but in its political sense, there’s no outside to the game. It’s larping all the way down.

Some parts of our culture are coping better with this shift than others. Among the worst performers, to my eye, are mainstream liberals of both left and right. Many have responded to the larpification of everything by concluding that in losing objectivity we’ve lost reality. Some then imagine they can make reality whatever they want it to be by sheer force of will (the Trump/Bush approach). Others suggest we can fix things by supplying enough facts to prove whatever we already believed (the SAGE/counter-SAGE approach). Others, such as Laurie Penny, try to refuse to play.

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But we haven’t lost reality, just the fixed vantage point we pretended we had from which to evaluate it. What we have instead is a kind of reality-shaping free-for-all, and there’s no opting out.

As most of us flounder, disoriented, we’re starting to see subcultures adapting. The old story about the Inuit having 50 words for snow is (appropriately) itself probably fake news. But much as a snow-dwelling people might be expected to develop specialist terminology for different types of frozen precipitation, we should understand the emergence of words like ‘larp’ and ‘performative’ as analogous. We’re developing a specialist vocabulary for types of unreality.

We’re also having to find new ways to talk about the reality that, inconveniently, refuses to go away completely. The grim story of the Iraq invasion and its destructive and bloody aftermath gave the lie to Bush’s messianic faith in his capacity to create a new reality to order. Humans still can’t really change sex. And no amount of fiddling the statistics can bring back those people who’ve already died of coronavirus.

The political future turns on our being able to get used to parsing our new Babel for what’s actually happening, and what actually matters. We have to get used to doing this without trying to eliminate the element of LARP (spoiler: can’t be done) or pretending we can abolish reality (ditto).

But there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. If the ground is moving under all our feet now, the way forward is learning how to dance.