When Ellie Reeves opens Labour conference, she will be the first Labour minister to do so since Harriet Harman walked off the stage in Brighton 15 years ago. For the 20,000 Labour supporters flocking to Liverpool this year, it is in many ways the first chance at a victory party.
In No 10, there is a dilemma about how much ministers can use that sense of celebration – with a story to drive home about the dire state of Labour’s inheritance and amid a background of weeks of turmoil over winter fuel allowance, donations and the prime minister’s chief of staff.
But those close to Keir Starmer say he will use this moment to lean into a sense of hope about what a Labour government can do – and to spell out the tangible change that he expects to deliver in the country over the next five years.
The message will be how effective and serious government can be a “reckoning for populism”. It will be this allegation that Labour plans to hammer home against the Tories.
“Rightwing populism can be electorally successful, but it can never govern successfully, it’s why they ended up with five prime ministers in their 14 years,” one senior aide said. “They increased sentences of prisoners and told voters they don’t need to have a prison built near them and that results in a prison system about to collapse.
“For us, it is about saying that style of governance should never be actually allowed to run the country again. It is a story I will be telling to my grandchildren about what they did.”
It will also be a moment – they say – where Starmer will lift his sights beyond the relentless pessimism of Labour’s inheritance and say explicitly that Labour will not be held back by what has gone before.
“We will point to all the things that we can begin this autumn and that is the story we can tell – that we will not allow our inheritance to stop the work of change,” one close adviser said.
The story will be of rail nationalisation, building onshore wind, renters reform, workers’ rights, House of Lords reform, teacher recruitment, Ofsted reform, a planning overhaul – all of which are things Starmer will say can immediately begin. There will be some new announcements – on timings and scope – but no major revelations.
The fresh tone of the conference speech is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the doom-mongering of the last few months has gone a touch too far. But there is a still a determination to highlight the state of the inheritance – and that is a refrain that will continue for not months, but years to come.
“It’s important to keep telling the story that the problems the country has are not inevitable,” one senior adviser said. “Maybe we need to adjust the treble and the bass, but we certainly think the tune is right.”
Starmer’s reputation for squeaky clean politics has taken a battering in recent weeks, with front pages full of questions over donations of clothes and free hospitality tickets. There is a strong feeling that conference has to be a moment when ministers can regain some control of the agenda and Starmer will use it to talk about government with purpose.
“The rose garden speech was the inheritance speech,” one source close to Starmer said, referring to the recent address where Starmer said things would “get worse before they got better”.
“This is now putting the emphasis on what is next. It is about this government’s purpose. That doesn’t mean Obama 2008 hope and change. But it is saying that the tough decisions are not the end goal. It’s the beginning of something.”