“The return of the sausages”: Keir Starmer accurately characterised the Labour conference, a collection of freeloaders, deadbeat socialists and “progressive” zealots, with a sizeable representation of human hamburgers from the trade union movement. If the platform party was unprecedentedly well dressed, it had Lord Alli to thank for that. Most striking was the dispirited atmosphere, more like the final pre-election conference of a doomed administration than the celebratory rally of a party that had recently secured a landslide victory.
The speeches, like the semi-policies they obscured, were disjointed and mutually contradictory: Starmer’s Labour is a jigsaw in which the pieces do not fit together, his rhetoric the product of a cacophony of competing speech writers, all trying to cram in their soundbites. In his speech he insisted, “If we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons overground”, before going on to eulogise “The beauty of the Lake District.” “The hope – beaten out of us,” lamented Starmer, without acknowledging it was his chancellor Rachel Reeves who had performed that flagellation.