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…
