BY this point the advisers will have made a list, checked it twice and tried to find a pleasing tone between naughty and nice.

The all important tie question will be argued over till the last minute. So much effort goes into a leader’s conference speech. Pity, then, that when Ed Miliband gets to his feet next week the question on many a mind will be: “Why has Labour let the work experience kid loose on the podium?”

Mr Miliband’s youthful looks make him an easy target for sketch writers and other opponents. In his leader’s speech, Nick Clegg laid into the Labour leader and his colleague Ed Balls for being “Gordon Brown’s backroom boys”.

Though this made them sound like the naffest boy band ever, the Deputy Prime Minister wanted listeners to be in no doubt about the nature of this pair of Iagos, “always plotting, always scheming, never taking responsibility”. Any resemblance between these responsibility dodgers and LibDem members of the Coalition Government is, of course, purely coincidental.

William Hague will doubtless be drafted in to craft a killer quip about Mr Miliband for David Cameron’s speech. The aim will be to portray him as a boy politician not up to the man’s work required in these tough times. According to a recent Populus poll, voters tend to agree. Asked if they could see Labour’s youngest ever leader as prime minister, 63% said no. Even among the party’s own supporters, 49% had trouble picturing Ed and Justine putting out the recycling boxes at Downing Street. Although only three years younger than Mr Clegg and the Prime Minister, the 41-year-old is regarded as having a lot of growing up to do.

He has always had this problem, yet somehow he manages to overcome it. Eventually. I worked at Westminster in the 1990s when Mr Balls and Mr Miliband were beginning their backroom boys period. They were an odd pair, with Ed M very much the junior partner in the relationship yet not willing to be treated as such. It was the opposition years, a time of punishingly late nights and horribly early starts, with Ed M one of the busiest worker bees of all. One day, it must have been all of lunchtime, he greeted a newly arriving Ed B with all the joy of a spouse standing at the door at 2am. “Where have you been?” he snapped. “Sleeping,” laughed Ed B, charging past in his prop forward way, no further explanation offered. As pairings went, they were less the Chuckle Brothers and more Michael and Fredo Corleone. Of the two, Mr Miliband seemed to be the one destined to go on a fishing trip one day.

Mr Miliband was underestimated then, and in the leadership contest when it came. His chief opponent was his blood brother, a clash that strained their relationship and tainted Ed’s victory. David, it emerges, will not be in Liverpool next week. The leadership contest was the public’s main introduction to Ed, and it wasn’t a favourable one. Not only had he taken the crown from big brother but he had done so with the help of the union brothers. Whose side was he really on?

One year on, Miliband junior is still struggling to look like a senior figure on the political landscape. He is failing, personally and politically, to engage. One way to gauge the likeability of a politician is to subject them to the beer test, as in: “Would you like to have a cold one with this guy?” (And yes, it is always a guy.) With Gordon Brown, for all his flaws, the answer would be yes. Ditto Tony Blair, pre-Iraq, John Smith, Neil Kinnock, James Callaghan, and Harold Wilson. Mr Miliband falls into the Michael Foot, “Mm, well ...” category.

His bio for the party conference will hardly have undecideds queuing to buy him a pint, particularly in Scotland where, unreconstructed types that we are, the north London intellectual millionaire look (house bought for £1.6 million, he told Piers Morgan in a GQ interview) goes down about as well as a Bullingdon Club photograph.

From this bio we learn that “Ed’s” childhood heroes were Alex Higgins and Geoffrey Boycott, he graduated from Oxford (PPE) and has a masters from the LSE. He has spent almost his entire working life in politics. Tempted yet? How about that his favourite television shows are Dallas and Desperate Housewives? Finger on the cultural pulse there, Ed. Next he’ll be raving about some popular beat combo called Duran Duran.

Yet there’s lots more in that biography that should be highlighted. While he has spoken in the past about the parents who escaped the Nazi terror and made new lives in Britain, he has been reluctant to talk much about himself as a father and husband. It’s an admirable stance. There are few things grislier than politicians playing happy families in public, but it wouldn’t hurt to come across as a little more in touch with voters.

Mr Miliband is not alone there. All three UK party leaders have more in common with the man in the moon than the punter in the street. While personality matters – just ask Gordon Brown – Mr Miliband will stand or fall on where he perches politically. Of big, impressive ideas he doesn’t appear to have any. In Liverpool he will go through the traditional motions for any Labour leader in standing up to the unions and trying to reduce their influence. Given how much the unions believe he “owes” them, he is to be wished the best of British with that.

On the economy, it is Mr Balls who is making the case for easing up on austerity and implementing a plan B. Both he and his boss are wide open to the charge that their fingerprints are all over the economic state we’re in. It’s the fairest of cops, but at least Mr Balls is addressing the indictment.

Do voters believe Mr Miliband has learned from the past? Or that the former economics lecturer at Harvard has a bright idea or 10 about how to deal with the global economic downturn? It’s good to talk about a “quiet crisis”, but shouting about it would be better.

There is a certain poetry in starting his fight back in Liverpool. It was Militant’s behaviour in that city in the 1980s that prompted Neil Kinnock’s finest hour at a podium when he tore into the “grotesque chaos” of a Labour council working against the interests of the ordinary working man and woman. One year into his leadership, school’s out for Mr Miliband. Time to go to work, kid.