On a defensive day, Labour’s conference lurched from the sentimental to the sullen. One moment the hall was weeping about the 1989 Hillsborough disaster as a community choir, all the more affecting for its occasional off-key note, sang You’ll Never Walk Alone. Minutes later, Anas Sarwar, the party’s leader in Scotland, was telling Nigel Farage ‘you are a pathetic, poisonous little man’.
Reform bashing was everywhere. It cheered up the delegates. Charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, peddlers of division and hatred: these were but some of the insults hurled at Mr Farage’s brigade. Then Jo Stevens, Welsh Secretary, went for the big one. ‘They can’t even,’ she gasped, ‘spell Caerphilly!’
Lady Morgan, first minister of Wales, possibly went even further but she did so in the Welsh language. The Liverpool audience boggled a bit. Her ladyship, closing her handbag: ‘You can clap that.’ Which they obediently did, despite not having understood a syllable. The day began with Sir Keir Starmer vouchsafing an interview to Laura Kuenssberg of the BBC. She was rough with him. ‘How much trouble are you in?’ And: ‘What’s Andy Burnham up to?’
Sir Keir’s left toecap started whizzing like a propeller. His eyeballs thrashed in their sockets. He did that Bill Nighy thing with his lips. He was, by his standards, jolly, jolly cross. He has reached the ‘nobody understands me’ stage of his development. It happens to most tormented geniuses when the public fails to appreciate their genius.
Shouting over Laura repeatedly, he snapped that Reform was ‘immoral’ and ‘racist’. And he scoffed at Nigel Farage’s current standing in the polls, saying that politics ‘is not a popularity contest’. Actually, that is precisely what elections are.
‘I just need the space to get on!’ cried Sir Keir in an exasperated tone. Questions touched briefly on a £20,000 field he bought for his late mother towards the end of her life, when she was in a wheelchair. It was for her donkeys.
Keir Starmer appearing on BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg in Liverpool on Sunday
‘She loved her donkeys,’ said Sir Keir, and tears formed in his eyes. I was feeling pretty watery myself. What an emotional roller-coaster politics is. But Kuenssberg’s as tough as biltong and within a trice she was back to Sir Keir’s party-management difficulties, asking: ‘What if the problem is you?’
Sir Keir, still recovering from the donkeys moment, said this was no time for ‘navel-glazing’. We need to know more about navel-glazing.
A coffin was left at the conference gates by protesting farmers. They and the Palestinian rights mob were soon squaring up to one another. Rural beef versus green-haired vegans. My money was on the farmers. The Aussie PM, Anthony Albanese, made a speech. A smooth sorta Bruce with the yellowish complexion of an American newsreader.
I saw stewards blocking Brian Leishman MP from the hall. Mr Leishman is no friend of the Starmerites.
Ministers paid tribute to colleagues who were sacked in the reshuffle. We were asked to remember Dame Nia Griffith, who was vaporised from the Welsh Office. It sounded as if Nia had left this world, not just lost her job. Ellie Reeves, more capable sister of Rachel, chaired the first session of the day. This was awkward, for she was recently demoted by Sir Keir. Ellie, valiantly sunny, kept saying ‘incredibly’.
Dougie Alexander drawled thanks to Ian Murray, whom he knifed (sorry, I mean ‘succeeded’) as Secretary of State for Scotland. Dougie has been around so long, he is starting to resemble a David Cameron waxwork effigy left out in the sun. And then another touching cameo. The party’s new general secretary, Hollie Ridley had just unburdened herself of a long rant about Reform – this conference is obsessed with Farage – when she went all drippy-voiced and asked the conference to spare a thought for a stigmatised minority: millionaire political donors.
‘They are driven by the same things as us,’ she cooed. ‘A desire to deliver positive change in the world and we are very lucky to have them.’
Given their poll ratings and this infighting, they certainly are.
