Outside the conference centre, delegates were forced to fend off hustlers competing to thrust copies of Socialist Worker, the Morning Star, Labour Party Marxists, Solidarity and Labour Briefing into their hands. The left of the Labour party just can’t bear to be outdone. Any splintering the right can do, they can do better. One front page had a large photo of Jeremy Corbyn looking suspiciously like an image of the other JC on the Turin shroud. Jeremy the Redeemer and Jeremy the Martyr are popular themes in Liverpool right now. One lone unbeliever stood apart, trying to interest people in Labour First, the voice of the Corbyn refuseniks, but he wasn’t doing great business. Even to consider taking one is now a thoughtcrime.
Things were rather less frenzied inside. Most party conferences are surrounded by a ring of steel, with everyone being forced to go through airport-style security before they are admitted, but here you can wheel in suitcases without anyone giving a second glance. Either the Labour party is now so confident that no one will want to bomb it or it’s not really that bothered if anyone does. Either way, it’s not an entirely reassuring dialectic.
The Labour party infighting also stops at the door. Those MPs and activists who opposed Corbyn’s re-election as leader have by and large chosen to keep themselves to the fringe venues. There are limits to any politician’s hypocrisy and they aren’t yet quite ready to smile and cheer. Give them another couple of weeks for that. And being caught on camera looking depressed is not a great look.
Nor are the Corbynistas that loud. If they want to let their hair down and have some fun, they decamp 20 minutes walk up the road to Momentum’s “The World Transformed” event for music, poetry – the Poems for Jeremy Corbyn book is on sale for £10 – and a group discussion about media bias. The main conference hall is a holier place. A shrine. Somewhere to celebrate Jeremy’s second coming in the appropriate manner.
The shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, began her speech by spending five minutes extolling Jeremy’s many virtues and declaring her undying devotion. She got a far bigger ovation for that than anything else she said. Though, as her two main other contributions were to insist that Northern Ireland was a foreign country and that Israel and Palestine could be sorted with a bit of light chat, it might just have been an appropriate response. Even so, Corbyn must be slightly bemused at the reverence in which he is held. He had imagined he was signing up to be a party leader, not the messiah.
The big-ticket item of the morning session was John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, who only had to walk on stage to be love-bombed with applause. He waved back, slightly self-consciously. He isn’t as comfortable in his new celebrity status as Corbyn. Nor is he as fluent. McDonnell can often appear dissociated, such is the mismatch between what he is saying and its delivery. “I am angry” can sound much the same as “I am happy”. There are times when this feels chilling, but when he’s talking about the economy it’s vaguely reassuring. A bank manager’s detachment is just what you need when the country’s cash is at stake.
“We are the government in waiting,” he declared, perhaps wisely not committing himself to how long that wait would be. No one in the hall thought to ask, so McDonnell moved on to Brexit. In any negotiations, he would prioritise the preservation of the single market to protect goods and services. This was a new McDonnell that no one had seen before. A McDonnell that was prepared to back the financial services industry he had previously seemed quite happy to see go to the wall.
McDonnell didn’t just extend an olive branch to the City – several merchant bankers were having cardiac arrests at the idea of being on the side of Red Labour rather than the Tories on Brexit – he also went out of his way to congratulate some of the Labour rebels. Owen Smith, Jonathan Reynolds and Caroline Flint all got a namecheck. It was hard to tell if he was genuine or not, because he said it in the same way he had previously called them Blairite traitors. But it was a step in the right direction.
He even praised the last Labour government, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to say the words “Tony Blair” before going on to re-announce the £10 national living wage he had announced in last year’s conference speech. If you can’t repeat yourself at a revivalist meeting, when can you?
