I’ve been wondering for a while about Tuesdays. Last week I found myself virtually alone in a hotel lobby in Brighton. There was me and a man vacuuming. Here’s the reason why this was surprising — I was in the main conference hotel, it was 9am, and this was in the middle of Labour conference week.

An evolutionary psychologist might explain why there were so few people at the Labour conference and so many at the Conservatives’ this year. We’ll leave that for another time. For the moment I am wondering about Tuesdays.

You see, once the party leader has spoken at a party conference, the air goes out of the dinghy. The journalists, the lobbyists and all but the most hardened party members start to head home. By next morning the halls are empty.

So what do you do? Obvious. You hold the leader’s speech on the last day and keep people hanging on until the final moment. And that’s what the Lib Dems and the Conservatives did. But not Labour. The party scheduled Gordon Brown for Tuesday.

In the old days of Harold Wilson and so forth, the Labour Party did not have a leader as a group. It was the parliamentary party that had the leader. And on Tuesday Brown, as leader, was scheduled to give a parliamentary report to the rest of the conference. The party’s constitution changed in the early 1980s to make the parliamentary leader the leader of the whole organisation. And politics itself has changed utterly. But the leader’s speech has stayed on Tuesdays. In other words, it might make no political sense any more, but because Hugh Gaitskell reported on a Tuesday, Brown also spoke on a Tuesday.

When I was boring on to my friends about my inability to understand this, one of them recommended a book (which he knows is a good way to shut me up). “Read Ellen Langer’s Mindfulness,” he advised me, “and all will be revealed.” So I did. And it was.

Langer, a Harvard social psychologist, is most famous for her work on old people. Indeed, her work was so interesting that it has prompted plans for Jennifer Aniston to portray the professor in a film about her experiments.

What has captured the imagination is the way that, by giving elderly people in a care home control over their lives, sometimes in tiny ways (such as caring for a pot plant), you can extend their lives.

Particularly striking was the positive effect on health and longevity of getting people to think of themselves as they were 20 years earlier. A group was asked to dress, argue, eat meals, listen to the music and read the articles printed in their youth. She found that the health benefits of even quite a short period of doing this were significant and long-lasting.

The point of this sort of experiment was to point out the deleterious impact of mindlessness. Langer argues that we categorise things rigidly and behave automatically without thinking. We follow instructions without thinking whether there might be a better way to do things. She found, for instance, that when she told a group of students that she had sprained her ankle and needed an Ace bandage, a remarkable number returned from the pharmacy with nothing when they found the Ace brand was out of stock.

But Langer probably wouldn’t be that impressed with my citing Tuesday leaders’ speeches as an example of mindlessness. She would ask why you needed a leader, what a speech was, whether a party conference fulfilled any objective, and whether the continued existence of the Labour Party was necessary.

In other words, before I laugh at someone else’s mindlessness, she would remind me that I exhibit plenty of my own.

There are make-up artists, stylists and photocall specialists waiting in the wings at party conferences to make sure the principals look just right. So is all of this a waste of time? No.

Chris Dillow, a blogger, has directed me to a fascinating paper by Amy King and Andrew Leigh, published in August by the Australian National University.

The two researchers handed out photographs to voters to assess the beauty of candidates in the 2004 Australian federal election. Then they analysed the results.

It turns out that “beautiful candidates are indeed more likely to be elected, with a one standard deviation increase in beauty associated with a 1.5-2 percentage point increase in vote share”.

Intriguingly, the effect turns out to be stronger when applied to male candidates rather than female ones. I wonder how many policy measures produce a change in voting behaviour that large.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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