The big question that everyone is asking in Manchester after the early rounds of non-action is: "Will it all kick off - and if so when?" When will the pretence of peace in our time end and everyone get stuck into some decent bloodletting about leadership?
Nobody, it seems, wants to be the first to let rip. No one wants to be blamed for starting the mayhem. The Blairite plotters have gone quiet (at least pretty much so). So have the anti-Blairites. Even the unions are on good behaviour.
But MPs on the centre-left are increasingly suspicious. They suspect a trap has been laid for them.
The anti-Gordon brigade, I am told, is trying to goad the left into losing its cool at fringe meetings across Manchester by making provocative ultra-Blairite speeches.
"'They are trying to engineer rows. There is no doubt about that," said one senior figure. "They want us to respond so all hell can break loose and the conference will implode on Gordon. But we are not reacting. We know what they are up to."
The left says the first signs of this tactic came at a Progress rally in Leeds last weekend. MPs were startled by the way Caroline Flint, the über-Blairite housing minister, started talking in a strikingly un-leftwing way about benefit scroungers. Then, at a Fabian fringe yesterday, Hazel Blears tried it, they say, by telling everyone that unless the party appealed ever more to the middle classes and not just the working classes it was finished.
For the last week most pundits have claimed the plot is disorganised. But more senior Labour figures are beginning to wonder. They are sure it is being run in a very organised way by those close to the Blairite thinktank Progress. And they are convinced that the plotters' game at conference is to engineer destabilising division while blaming others for doing so.
