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.”
Sir Keir Starmer during his speech and press conference in the rose garden at 10 Downing Street, 27 August 2024. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
The speech in the rose garden was deeply divisive among Labour MPs and ministers. “I think that speech was a mistake,” one minister said. “It felt like over-egging the pudding.”
Another cabinet source added: “We hear the ‘things can only get worse’ refrain and my question is – why are we emphasising this so very much? In service of what?”
Though the embarrassing row over the donations for Starmer’s wife’s dresses has been leading the front pages, it is the winter fuel allowance cut that most Labour MPs and advisers privately think could end up the most damaging.
“Winter fuel is a very, very big mistake, in my view,” one former shadow minister said. “I think people do not really fully understand yet how bad a decision that was to make in the early weeks and how it will haunt us.”
“The thing about the bad inheritance is true but it also looks nakedly political so I think it really hasn’t quite landed yet,” another cabinet source said. “The winter fuel crisis is not over. We’ve basically turned the Express and the Mail into Brownites. The Tories are now the torchbearers for universal benefits.”
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Winter fuel allowance could be the major row of conference. Unite – a key critic of Starmer – is expected to submit a motion to condemn the cut that will hit all but the poorest pensioners. That is likely to be particularly embarrassing if the motion attracts the support of the biggest trade union, Unison.
Inside No10, there is some defiance about these noises off. They point to the dire levels of public trust in politics and believe that optimistic but ultimately dishonest rhetoric from politicians has been extremely damaging.
“The last time you see any level of hope in public polling was in the vaccine bounce in the summer of 2021 – when we were canvassing in local elections, people were talking about Global Britain, they were talking about freeports, they were talking about levelling up and they were generally optimistic that the last five years of serious political upheaval in this country were leading to something better,” said a senior adviser. “And it was ultimately a disaster because when it didn’t happen, it is obvious it leads to a Tory defeat.
“But it is quite dangerous for democracy for politicians to be doing that, it erodes trust in government as a whole. It’s got to be real, it can’t be this fake stuff, it can’t be this boosterism, cakeism, which was offered to voters – because it is damaging for your trust in the institutions.”
That need for light and shade will be reflected in every cabinet minister’s conference speech – a diagnosis of the inheritance and the building blocks for tangible change.
Delegates wave Palestinian flags at the Labour party’s annual conference in Liverpool, 2018. Starmer’s team will ensure discipline over issues such as Gaza at this year’s event. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA
Reeves, the party chair and Cabinet Office minister who is the sister of the chancellor, Rachel, will open conference reflecting on the election – but also underlining how the overhaul of the Labour party was, they believe, key to that victory.
That overhaul has meant the vast majority of the party’s leftwing members will stay away, many still bruised by the bitter battles over selections and deselections and angry about early government decisions on two-child benefit cap and winter fuel allowance.
But strict discipline at party conference has always been a key aim of Starmer’s most iron-fisted advisers. They believe it was crucial to attracting Tory voters to take the party seriously. “We cannot return to the conferences of old,” one said, in a reference to the heated rows on conference floor that were had over Brexit and Gaza.
All of the new MPs have been given free conference passes to try to ensure a significant attendance. But there is still a strong sense of harsh discipline among the parliamentary party. “The prefects will be polishing their badges for conference,” one veteran MP joked about his starry-eyed new colleagues.
Some of the conference’s most desirable party invites have had to be massively curtailed because of the new obligation to invite the sheer number of enthusiastic new MPs – meaning many unlucky hangers-on will lose out. “There’ll be a lot of Lucky Saint [non-alcoholic beer] being consumed,” one No 10 adviser said with a smile.
Reeves, who was also one of the most important election strategists, said that members and MPs should be allowed their moment of celebration. “I don’t think the fact that it’s our first conference in government for 15 years has passed anyone by. And I think we should remind ourselves that the outcome of the general election wasn’t preordained,” she said.
“We worked hard to get to that point, and that includes the trade unions and all the other stakeholders in the party. Of course there will be a real sense of that at conference. It’s a time for the movement to come together.”
