his week, The World Transformed festival released its programme for the month of September. It is, like the Edinburgh fringe, sufficiently established as a festival of ideas; you might almost forget it was once pegged to the formal events of the Labour conference, backed by Momentum, and partly created to harness the intellectual enthusiasm of new members. More than that, The World Transformed breathed new life into the established party conference. Diehard Corbyn sceptics watched the fringe festival discussing the largest issues of the day and were reminded of something nobler than machine politics, something more like the incipient days of the trade union movement. It wasn’t necessarily that the ideas were better, rather that spontaneous congregation is compelling in itself, it creates an energy that the virtual world cannot. Nobody gets together in a room to discuss climate change, socialism, decolonisation, utopias, unless they are motivated by hope, or self-advancement. And TWT never looked like a hotbed of personal ambition, in any traditional political sense. It won’t be the same as a remote experience, but TWT should survive. As will the Labour conference, which will also be held online. The Democrats’ convention in the US passed off under the same conditions pretty well, but Keir Starmer has to do more than get by. Five months into his leadership, people are still wondering exactly who he is – a more competent version of Jeremy Corbyn, per his 10 pledges? A stealthy Blairite, given his manifest attachment to law and order and his overriding respectability? Or – always the worst charge, affectionate yet damning – a Miliband mark two, full of sound ideas he is too cautious to enact? The style of conference he runs, whether it’s seen as from the top or the bottom, will be taken as a signature of his leadership. Tony Blair had a command and control approach to party conferences. As members used to grumble, it was a load of panels telling the rank and file what was what, the double insult being that this was rarely anything they were waiting to hear, and never anything they hadn’t heard before. The real audience was the regular folk at home – the members were just meat in the room. “Like a bunch of Lib Dems!” I remember someone complaining in 2005, with so much feeling in those six words it could have been a novella. It was considered both central and unique to Labour’s values that its members would be involved in decision-making, and singular to Blair that he ignored them. None of this was exactly accurate. Labour leaders long before Blair had skirted past the members when it suited them. And Labour isn’t the only party that professes to involve its members – the Green party is plenty pluralistic. Yet the caricature of Blair as the leader who overturned a conference tradition that plugged the party into the foundational values of the Labour movement was a useful one; if all his later mistakes could be traced back to the readiness with which he severed those democratic levers, then the structure was still sound. As Labour battled with its waning popularity in government and in opposition, attitudes towards conference became one of the organising differences within the party, between those who saw conference as essentially a performance event for spectators at home, the members acting as set dressing to drive home its success and unity, versus those who thought re-engaging members was the only route back to popularity – for how could you be popular, if you didn’t have purpose? What one side called bloodletting, the other called meaningful debate. Through this nearly 30-year period, outsider commentary paid very little attention to members’ chagrin, tending to instead evaluate conferences entirely according to whether their performances could plausibly convert the undecided centre. Consequently, journalists were staggered when the members voted for Corbyn, the man who offered nothing to the swing voter while promising card-carriers the Earth. Yet that too was a caricature: the members and leader enjoyed only a short honeymoon period before they were at loggerheads over Brexit. By 2017, CLPs were using the very rebel spirit that had made Corbyn party leader to force him out of his strategic leave position. Let’s park this eternal question of who lost the 2019 election between remainers and the former leader; it is hackneyed to the point of being unkind to repeat how unpopular Corbyn was in the run-up to it. What recent years have shown is that most of the debate around the power of the membership is symbolic: they are a mighty mandate when it suits their leader, and a clearable obstacle when it doesn’t. The treatment of the members is synecdoche for the party’s positioning: certainly, some leaders like to make a show of ignoring the membership to indicate how much more likely they are to listen to regular folk; other leaders pay vocal and elaborate respect to the members as a signal of their radical intent, but that doesn’t mean they’ll let them interfere with their strategic vision. The value of members, meanwhile, isn’t in their carefully crafted idea for the Green New Deal or in their subs, but in the palpable sense of possibility they create by being prepared to turn up – just as it was at The World Transformed. The temptation for Starmer will be to move with enough subtlety that everyone can see in him the ghost of the leader they want him to be. But the real challenge is to use this eerie, disembodied conference to establish what Starmerism is, distinct from what came before it. This will require an approach to the members that is original and that can’t be traced back to the 1990s, the 2000s or the 2010s. This won’t be a great showman year for the Labour leader – how could it be, without a live audience? – but it might be the unchosen break the party needed to re-examine its myths, none of which are entirely wrong, but some which are much more energising than others. • Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist