With Labour party delegates waving the flags of the UK nations during Keir Starmer’s conference speech, the beleaguered prime minister was reassured that his paean to patriotism had hit the spot.
Downing Street insiders say his address had been locked down for three weeks, avoiding the usual last-minute rewrites and adjustments, as he was so clear in his mind of the argument he wanted to make. Aides had met in Chequers at the beginning of the summer to find Starmer had reams of notes on his vision of how to address the rising tide of nationalism.
What most in the hall could not see but were clear to anybody watching on television were the stony faces of cabinet ministers sitting in the front row for much of his address.
The four days in Liverpool followed a predictable dramatic arc. Andy Burnham was the name on everyone’s lips at the beginning of conference but the butt of jokes from the main stage by the end.
Starmer, under pressure to give the speech of his life, delivered what many of his party had been waiting to hear: a full-throated defence of progressive values as the antidote to Reform, with no more equivocation.
Summing it up, one senior adviser said: “National renewal, patriotism, clear dividing lines between us and the left and the right, aimed directly at middle Britain.”
A minister said: “He finally made an emotional connection. Also scrappy and defiant, which is always good when your back’s to the wall.”
But any suggestion that Starmer has silenced his critics and left his rival chastened would be a chronically naive misreading of the grim mood among many cabinet ministers and MPs.
“If this conference had been held two weeks ago, I believe there might have been the possibility of a leadership challenge now,” a senior Labour politician said. “As it stands, I think a combination of the right speech and the conduct of Andy Burnham has saved Keir for now. If I was Keir I would send him a bunch of flowers.”
A cabinet minister said: “I don’t think this is over for Burnham, far from it. The commentator class has decided he fluffed it and it isn’t the comms strategy I would have deployed. But underneath all that, everyone knows his diagnosis of the peril we are facing is correct. Come next May, he might look like the Cassandra we should have all listened to. Maybe he will come back with better advisers and an actual strategy.”
The strategy will need to be an inventive one: multiple sources said Morgan McSweeney had let it be known he would never let Burnham stand in a byelection while he openly planned to challenge the leader.
Starmer still has many ministers and MPs willing him to succeed and who have been reassured by the speech he gave. One cabinet minister said: “It was always clear that Boris Johnson’s leadership was going to implode at some point. The same goes for Jeremy Corbyn’s. But that’s not the case here – the possibilities are wide open. Anything could happen.”
At least five cabinet ministers said they believed there would be a moment of reckoning for Starmer in May were Labour to lose in Wales and Scotland and lose a sweep of councils, especially in London. “He is a very decent man,” one minister said. “I think if there does come a moment where the country seems otherwise irreversibly on the path towards Farage then he would do the right thing and clear the way.”
But another minister disagreed. “This is not like Hartlepool, when he came close to resigning. He was miserable then. He actually does like being prime minister, especially what he can do on the international stage. I do not think he would resign easily after all we’ve fought for.”
Cabinet ministers spoke in private of being worried that Starmer had isolated himself too much from them, and a feeling that “the shutters have been coming down” when he feels under pressure.
They said those who had pushed No 10 on Gaza had in particular felt a degree of distance since. One said Starmer had shown he was not open enough to being challenged – and they repeated the idea that although Burnham had been too forthright in his criticism, the substance of his concerns about the party stifling debate was valid.
Senior cabinet ministers and other veterans politicians over the course of conference described agonising repeated attempts to get Starmer and No 10 to respond quicker to the threats of the far right. “It’s an analogue operation in a world which will not wait for them,” one cabinet minister said.
In the lead-up to conference, MPs had been sharing on WhatsApp an anonymously authored piece titled “What did we learn on our summer holidays?”. Written on the day after the divisive reshuffle, it warned in florid and sometimes tortured prose of impending disaster for the party.
“Labour won power in the old era but it is governing in the new, in a world it did not expect and in a country it does not know,” it said. “Cathartic crises have not produced positive change in Labour but political inertia. The party retains its old atrophying instincts and repeats its mistakes, ad nauseum.”
In Liverpool, the grim mood was mostly contained to the inner circle. The atmosphere in conference receptions and the bars around the Albert Dock was if anything more upbeat than at last year’s strangely pessimistic conference post election victory.
But several MPs remarked that it was hard to find much of the grassroots in between wall-to-wall lobbyists. Many junior ministers had stayed in London to get to grips with new briefs.
Two Labour-linked firms, Arden Strategies and Anacta, had pop-up venues in the centre of the conference courtyard, black alien-spaceship structures for talks and events, branding that decorated the backdrops of all the cabinet walking into conference.
Among aides in No 10, there is a feeling that Starmer has for now silenced many of his public critics. He will spend much of the next week out of the country, during the rest of the parliamentary recess for the Conservative party conference, though some allies are worried that he will “leave the pitch” having just started a fight with Farage.
Due back in Westminster in a week’s time, factions of MPs are beefing up. Receptions for the “red wall” group and blue Labour MPs were full to bursting. The Burnham-backed Mainstream group plans more interventions.
And the previously loyalist but increasingly impatient Labour Growth group, which counts dozens of ambitious new MPs among its members, announced a formal partnership with the Good Growth Foundation thinktank, a sign it will start a new muscular approach to publicly pitching policy that it believes the Treasury should offer.
Among those MPs, there is still a feeling that the government’s fundamental lack of ambition to tackle complex problems with the economy will be its eventual downfall.
Burnham left the conference venue before Starmer’s speech on Tuesday. His name may have been on the lips of MPs and members at the start of conference but there was another at the end: Shabana Mahmood, the new home secretary.
In fringe events, Mahmood exuded the confidence of a minister who knew that an entire reshuffle had been more or less engineered to get her into the Home Office. On Monday she swept through the conference to take the stage, ready to put a difficult argument before Labour activists.
Mahmood’s speech received less than a minute of applause. One seasoned journalist thought the audience may have been a little stunned by her punchy language and her wish to connect the rise of “ethno-nationalism” with the rise in legal and illegal migration.
While the party seemed to be struggling with Mahmood’s proposed measures, the media were not. The following day, her speech and the fringe meeting received a tide of positive headlines from newspapers across the political spectrum.
Asked would she ever consider taking on the job of prime minister, Mahmood, who attempts to respond to even the most difficult questions, declined to rule herself out. “You shouldn’t believe anyone in politics who says they’re not ambitious about the top job,” she said, “because they’re basically lying to you.”
