1. At 6 p.m., dozens of bells ring out and a traditional Hindu devotional song sounds fuzzily through the loudspeakers.

2. As the party withers, Patricia Hewitt and Stephen Byers have floated the idea of somehow opening the imminent Labour leadership election to either "the general public", or the party‘s fuzzily defined Supporters‘ Network (in Byers‘s priceless words, "Labour must learn the lessons of its own history and ensure that the priorities of a small, unrepresentative number of people are not allowed to distort our programme"). On the rare occasions that some kind of consultation rears its head, it is often less a matter of anyone making their voice heard than an exercise – as with the email survey sent round by the then home secretary Charles Clarke in November 2005 – based on questions like "Do you think the government should ensure there are new safeguards to protect innocent people?". Not that the Conservative party has ever had much of a tradition of internal democracy to betray, but the same scent of cynical sophistry was wafting around the Tory conference.