The Labour Party conference fulfilled its time-honoured purpose of providing respite for a beleaguered prime minister, assailed by the vicissitudes of government and the inveterate scheming of colleagues. This is an audience willing its leader on. A useful corrective to the Whitehall slog and the sniping of the Westminster village.
At conference everything is washed clean. At least for a few days. Unity was the vibe, with Keir Starmer greeted by thunderous applause in the hall from delegates as he rattled off a list of the party’s overlooked achievements in government, while he socked it to Nigel Farage. There is no mood in the activist base for a change in leader and the novelty of being in government again after 14 long years in the wilderness has still not worn off.
Not yet.
Will it last, that’s the question. It’s clear that what was true before the conference is still true after it. The country is in turmoil; the product of a general dissatisfaction with Red/Blue politics, but this is overlaid by a stubbornly unresolvable cost-of-living crisis, barely functioning public services, the highest tax-take any of us has known and an all-pervading sense of national decline. Throw in the early manoeuvrings of World War Three and it’s a challenging in-tray for Keir Starmer, to put it mildly.
He might consider the past 12 months have been arduous, but the next year will be worse. A difficult Budget at the end of November and a potentially disastrous set of elections next May could undo this week’s positivity and with it his tenure in Downing Street.
Ministers are plainly rolling the pitch for more tax rises – skating perilously close to their pre-election promises not to raise income tax and VAT – as they seek to plug the hole in the public finances, unable, as they would have preferred, to trim the welfare bill.
And polls point to a devastating set of results in the spring, with Labour in Wales trailing in third place ahead of the all-out assembly elections, while the SNP rides high in Scotland and Reform is set to rampage through Labour’s English local government strongholds.
And then there’s Andy…
The Mayor of Greater Manchester dominated the first few days of the conference with a media blitz, laying out his alterative economic plans (dubbed ‘Manchesterism’ a more geographical version of the ‘aspirational socialism’ that he has used in two previous tilts at the party leadership).
His everyman style contrasts well against the photofit political class – and he remains popular with Labour’s grassroots and, critically, with voters more generally. His following in the parliamentary party is not as well-established, with familiar complaints about his flip-flopping and opportunism.
Yet Burnham has two essential attributes. The first is raw staying power. He’s been around forever. Still eight years younger than Starmer and along with Pat McFadden, John Healey, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband, Douglas Alexander and Hilary Benn, the last of the Gordon Brown cabinet.
But Burnham feels fresher than any of them. The time apart from Westminster has been productive. Apart from Sadiq Khan, he is the only Labour politician to have run anything of any scale for the past, wasted decade. He still has plenty in the tank.
As well as the ability to keep on keeping on, he remains an attractive Plan B, removed from the messy compromises of collective cabinet responsibility, but with his own record of delivery, particularly in driving economic growth and productivity. He’s tried and tested. It’s a pretty potent offer.
True, his pathway back into parliament is fraught with hypotheticals and may yet come to nothing, but the next year will focus the minds of his colleagues on their own political mortality. The threat of looming destruction is a great motivator to do in the boss. Burnham definitely overplayed his hand in Liverpool this week – too overt in his ambition and too brazen in his criticism – but that will not matter if his warnings about next May’s results are proved right.
Then there’s Nigel…
Farage and Reform are rampant and eating up entire tracts of political space as voters turn their backs on the two main parties. Yet it seems fruitless to obsess over them when the general election is more than three years away.
Sure, knock some spots off Farage – and Starmer certainly did that this week – but the tenor of the attacks on the Reform leader felt ill-advised. ‘He doesn’t like Britain, doesn’t believe in Britain,’ the Prime Minster insisted. Really? When voters hear that, they assume he means them, too. While David Lammy’s claim that Farage ‘flirted’ with the Hitler Youth was utterly deranged. Keir Starmer’s Downing Street operation has been bleeding staff for weeks for one reason or another, but it can afford to lose a few more if this is the standard of the advice given.
No, Keir Starmer’s original take – that he has to show in deed, not word, that Britons are steadily becoming better off and that he has a workable plan to reduce immigration – is the only way of recovering Labour’s political standing by spring 2029 and the expected general election.
Save the name-calling and obsessing about opponents within and without. ‘Deliveryism’ – his de facto political credo, in lieu of anything more ambitions – is boring and hard, but it is all he has.
Tags: Andy Burnham, Keir Starmer, Labour conference 2025, Manchester, Rachel Reeves, tax
