Professor Ed is not one for small talk, struggling to find anecdotes at a dozen separate receptions every evening at Labour’s conference in Manchester. My Celtic snout in the kilt told me how the temperature plummeted at the Scottish ceilidh when Miliband opened a wee speech with: “I met this bloke in Glasgow . . .” You might meet a “guy” or a “man” in Glasgae, as this column’s Braveheart said, but never the anglicised “bloke”. He did, however, express relief that Mili avoided the insulting “Jimmy” or “Jock”.

Seen energetically working the room was the Labour peer John Reid. Laird Reid is a director of the Olympic flop G4S, which supplied security guards in Manchester. My snout remarked that it was conscientious of one so esteemed to check delegates’ passes in person.

To the Hope Not Hate bash in Manchester, where your correspondent aimed for a cheap laugh by welcoming the “plebs” to a curry evening. The restaurant roared, but as the cheers died down a Welsh voice was heard shouting: “Speak for yourself, sir!” Lord Kinnock of Neil, for it was he, remains one of the best purveyors of the contrarian one-liner. I recall him yelling over the applause as the Murdinator, “Tommy Gun” Watson, entered the Gay Hussar in London: “Let it go to your head, son, let it go to your head.”

The military credentials of the private-school millionaire lout Andrew Mitchell have been questioned since he abused a Downing Street police officer. The Chief Whippersnapper boasts he served in the Royal Tank Regiment and was a UN peacekeeper. What he doesn’t say is it was an eight-months short service commission between Rugby and Cambridge. His army of enemies describes it as a taster course for public school boys. No wonder, when asked about Mitchell’s career, Paddy Ashdown, a Special Boat Service veteran, muttered: “There are soldiers and there are soldiers.” It is said of Captain Ashdown that he learned to kill with a cheese wire and of Mitchell that he orders his butler to avoid slicing the nose from the Brie.

As the offspring of Tony Blair and Jack Straw strive to follow in their fathers’ footsteps by finding parliamentary seats, the son of the Labour leader who won most elections is retiring from his seat in the cab of a railway engine. Giles Wilson, 64, son of the four-times winner Harold, will pull out of London Waterloo for the last time to head for retirement. The South-West Trains driver’s job is a far cry from the ambitions of children of today’s political class but Wilson Jr isn’t your typical horny-handed son of toil. Harold sent him to an expensive private school in north London and he owns a couple of restored branch-line stations in Devon.

Talking of Straw Sr, copies of his very readable autobiography weren’t available at the launch party for it because the Daily Mail, edited by his old Leeds University comrade Paul Dacre, was waiting to serialise the book. If the former foreign secretary could start a war in Iraq without weapons of mass destruction, a book launch without the book must’ve felt perfectly normal.

Kevin Maguire is associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror.