LABOUR leadership hopefuls had to concentrate yesterday, making a pitch at the Trade Union and Labour Party Liaison Organisation (Tulo) hustings for what remains the party’s most substantial and enduring support base.

They have worked out key themes and the coded phrases designed to outflank their rivals.

Liz Kendall described herself once again as the candidate the Tories fear, which might make sense in the Westminster village but surely has little resonance outside that strange island.

Why Tories should quake in their boots over someone who has nailed her flag to the austerity measures mast, closely mirroring their approach, is a mystery.

Her supporter John Woodcock sneers at Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper as “continuity Miliband,” implying that they have not put the boot into the former leader hard enough and suggesting that they could only lead Labour to a further defeat.

Kendall lectured her trade unionist audience against returning to the past, but her stance smacks of a belief that it’s possible to turn the clock back to 1997 when Labour, led by Tony Blair, was elected in a landslide.

Many things have changed since then — not least popular perceptions towards Blair, now widely seen as not only a warmonger but a self-centred money-grabber who will do anything for cash.

New Labour may have wrongfooted the Tories for a time by adopting their policies and phraseology, but this tactic rebounded on Labour, alienating millions of its voters.

Burnham’s reference to Miliband as a “a man of principle, courage and integrity” went down well at Tulo, not least because many trade unionists valued the former leader’s more combative stance during the general election.

The shadow health secretary’s position on scrapping the lower level of the minimum wage for young adults also fell in line with his audience’s concept of the rate for the job.

However, Burnham has yet to jettison his post-election lurch to the right when, like all contenders with the exception of Jeremy Corbyn, he adopted Peter Mandelson’s misuse of “aspiration” to mean identification with better-off voters.

In Burnham’s case, this involved calling the widely appreciated mansion tax plan part of the “politics of envy.”

Cooper has emerged from the shadow of Ed Balls following her husband’s election defeat, showing herself as self-confident and offering change in terms of a first female Labour prime minister.

However, she has also developed her own warning code for audiences, especially in light of successive warm receptions for Corbyn.

Her caution for Tulo members was to vote not just for a candidate they could imagine as Labour leader but someone who could “look like a Labour prime minister from the start.”

This was directed at Corbyn and contains all the usual condescending prejudice against him — that he’s a good honest man of principle but utterly unelectable.

The idea that Labour can only be victorious if it replicates Establishment policies and fights elections on triangulation tactics or media perceptions of image is a philosophy of despair.

Such a tired and cynical format casts aside the possibility of a politician and a party actually enthusing the electorate by meeting the hitherto unanswered demand for political principle and competence.

Corbyn answers voter commitment to public ownership, higher living standards for working people, abandonment of Trident and opposing not only George Osborne’s emergency Budget but “the whole austerity strategy.”

His declaration that “you can’t cut your way to prosperity” has the makings of a successful general election slogan.