Rishi Sunak’s closing address to the Conservative conference thrilled the speechwriting team – of Sir Keir Starmer. Before the event, there was some concern among them that the Tory leader might produce a performance strong enough to compel a recrafting of the script that the Labour leader will deliver in front of his party on Tuesday. “Do we need to rewrite our speech?” one of the team said to me once he’d heard the prime minister. He answered his own question with a jubilant: “No!”
The Tory leader’s attempt to rebrand himself as an agent of “change” was the audacity of the desperate. This is a pitch that is so preposterously remote from the truth that it can’t work for a man who’s already had nearly a year at Number 10 and presides over the 14th year of Conservative government. Team Starmer find it hard to contain their astonishment that the prime minister’s speech contained not a word about such critical issues as housing and social care while having nothing meaningful to say about the public’s immediate priorities, which are the crumbling health service and the crunch on living standards.
The essential smallness of Mr Sunak’s speech came at the end of a Tory conference in Manchester that had the smell of a party preparing for opposition. This improves the opportunity and increases the obligation for Labour to use its time in Liverpool to present itself as a party ready for government. In command of his team, while the Tory leader is visibly not in charge of his, Sir Keir has good grounds for thinking that Labour’s conference cannot help but look great in comparison with the chaotically fractious and manically factional Tory gathering. The resounding byelection victory in Rutherglen at the expense of the SNP has injected extra fizz into Labour spirits.
This makes the Labour leadership happy, but also highly wary of coming over as a swollen-headed bunch of swaggerers who assume that the election result is a done deal. Voters loathe it when they think they are being taken for granted and pollsters report that the phrase “he’s already measuring the curtains” has started to crop up in their focus groups when members of the public talk about Sir Keir. In the interview with the Labour leader that we publish today, he cautions his party: “There’s a long way to go yet.”
Getting the tone right will be important at this conference. Cheerful and confident is a good look; cocky and triumphalist isn’t. Despite the double-digit lead in the opinion polls, despite the death rattle of the Tories, despite the travails of the SNP, Labour conference planners do not want this to be a high-fiving, air-punching, back-slapping jamboree at which everyone goes about congratulating themselves. I’m told that the leader’s team has issued strict instructions to conference event organisers that they are forbidden from introducing Sir Keir to a room as “Britain’s next prime minister”.
Of course, they hope people will be thinking exactly that when he delivers his leader’s speech, the best opportunity to showcase himself and his ideas that he gets all year, and possibly the last such chance before the election. Virtually all of his colleagues, including many who used to be consumed with doubt that he had the capacity to take them into power, now speak with admiration about the transformation of the party’s prospects under his leadership. “Keir is the first Labour leader in 10 years to look and sound like a prime minister-in-waiting,” remarks one former Labour cabinet minister who was not in earshot of Ed Miliband at the time of speaking. The pollsters report that Starmer bests Sunak when voters are asked which of them they’d prefer to see as prime minister. The worm in the bud is that they are both beaten by Don’t Know. Forging an emotional connection with voters is still a work in progress for the Labour leader. People close to him say that his speech will attempt to “deepen the sense of what he stands for, how he wants to change the country, and how he will go about it”. The image they would like to convey is a prospective prime minister who knows what he’s about, rolling up his sleeves ready to do the job. When he first became leader, there was a widespread assumption among the electorate that he is a posh bloke from a privileged background. The knighthood was a handicap. By talking a lot about his biography, the son of a nurse and a toolmaker seems to have made some headway conveying a sense of his modest family circumstances when he was growing up and how that animates his politics. But a lot of the electorate are still unsure who he is, and this creates space for the Tories to try to impose a negative definition on him.
A list of the things the Conservatives have achieved during their long years in power was conspicuously missing from the Tory leader’s conference speech. The absence of a record that they can boast about means the Conservatives will rely even more heavily than they usually do on trying to trash Labour’s credibility and especially the character of its leader. The Tories grasp that they are unlikely to succeed in convincing voters that Sir Keir is too scary to be allowed anywhere near Number 10. “People can see he is not Corbyn,” says one senior Conservative. “But we can say, because it is true, that he used to call Corbyn his friend.” They are seeking to frame the Labour leader as a shifty opportunist who will say anything to get elected. The conference shop in Manchester was selling flip-flops decorated with Sir Keir’s face. Winning the gold medal for the most cringeworthy platform stunt, the Tory party chair, Greg Hands, brandished a pair from the podium. Most Labour people shrug at this, but some of Sir Keir’s friends fret that it could have traction. “I don’t think Keir is a slippery person at all, but I worry that some voters do,” says one Labour veteran. The Tories aren’t lying when they say he has made many shifts in position. Going for him as a flip-flopper could be a promising line of attack – were it not the Tories doing the attacking. They have ping-ponged through three leaders in less than a year and made more flip-flops than you will see on a long, sandy beach on a hot August bank holiday. Mr Sunak, who has executed the mother of all U-turns on high-speed rail, is as well qualified to give lectures on consistency as Boris Johnson is to preach on the virtues of fidelity.
What the Tories say about them is not the first order question facing Labour this week. The most crucial one is whether Labour can communicate persuasively with the country. It should worry the shadow cabinet that only a shade more than a third of people currently saying they intend to vote Labour at the election think that the party has clear plans for the country. This suggests that Labour has a lot to do before it can be sure its support is properly locked in. The considerable amount of time and effort that has been put into developing and unveiling Sir Keir’s audacious five “national missions” has passed the majority of voters by. In an attempt to remedy that, the conference will see the daily release of policies designed to bridge the gap between the blue-sky ambitions of the missions and planet earth where the public crave practical improvements to their everyday lives.
There will be the attacks on the Conservative record that you would expect to hear at a Labour conference, but much more effort than in the past to explain what people should expect from a Starmer government. “If not them, why us?” is the exam question this conference has been set and it must be answered with compelling clarity and coherence. “We need to go more positive on our offer,” says one influential Labour figure. Shadow cabinet ministers scheduled to speak from the platform have been told that for each minute they spend lambasting the Conservatives they should devote three minutes to explaining why Britain will be better off for having a Labour government.
There is an overwhelming yearning for change, as even the Tories can now see. The overarching challenge for Sir Keir and his party is to convincingly explain, and in a way that cuts through to voters, why Labour is the change that the country needs. Do that successfully and he will look more like Britain’s next prime minister, though anyone who complacently calls him that in Liverpool can expect to be given a severe ticking off.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
