Sketch: EU campaign brings back indyref memories as Labour audience hisses at Laura Kuenssberg

So much so that when the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg began to ask Jezza a question, the immediate response from the Labour-supporting audience was - to hiss her.

Indeed, the largest round of applause of the whole event came when a journalist had the temerity to ask the chief comrade – just back apparently from a short break - if the one-time Europhobe felt in his heart of hearts that he had campaigned as hard as he could to keep Britain in the EU.

Jezza responded by saying: “It’s partly down to the media to report what the Labour Party says.”

Cue applause, roars and whistles as the comrades expressed their fulsome support for the media-bashing. All the while, the Labour leader glowed with satisfaction as if he had just scored a bullseye.

It brought back memories of the Scottish independence campaign when fire was directed against the media, most notably the BBC's Nick Robinson, who became something of a hate figure for some Yes campaigners.

The theme of the hairy Leftie’s speech at London’s Institute for Engineering and Technology on the Thames waterfront was protecting and strengthening workers’ rights in what he described as a “social Europe”.

As the pantheon of scientists from Michael Faraday and Alexander Graham Bell to Andre Maria Volta and Lord Kelvin looked on in the oak-clad lecture room, the Labour chief delivered his keynote speech, the most eye-catching aspect of which was the red-on-blue attack and the denouncing of the prophecies of doom, myth-making, histrionics and hype that had been produced during the campaign.

Although the chief comrade did not directly link this to any one person by also, in the same breath, mentioning George Osborne’s forecast of a yearlong recession should we extract ourselves from the Brussels bloc, it was pretty clear who Jezza was referring to.

His railing against Project Fear in the IET’s Kelvin lecture theatre had echoes of Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond of only a few days ago, when the SNP luminaries urged their fellow Remainers to ditch the negativity and accentuate the positive. It clearly did not work as 24 hours later, the Treasury was putting out how Brexit would cause economic Armageddon.

The only problem with this red-on-blue strategy within the context of the referendum campaign is that it might begin to confuse the dear old voter, who is told by one part of the Remain camp that voting Out would lead to an economic slump, only then to be told by another part that this is a load of baloney and that the real threat to Britain’s prosperity is not Brexit but the evil Tory Establishment.

The worrying thing for the uneasy In alliance of Cameron, Corbyn and Sturgeon is that when passions begin to run high, a negative, disunified and disjointed message can only help the other side; with or without the media-bashing.