Give it to the kids. They’ve succeeded where others have failed.
A widespread criticism of Sir Keir Starmer is he struggles to display political passion.
But youngsters finally got him to properly go up a gear on this.
In his address to Labour’s annual rally in Liverpool, Sir Keir quickly struck the right note for the party faithful on the NHS, the Queen, work, living standards and so on.
But it was only when he got to climate change, possibly because he’d warmed up by then, that he turned up the political heat.
“I come at this not just as leader of the Labour Party, but also as a father,” he stressed.
“And as a father, I am spurred on by the voices of our children, the cry of indignation, demanding our generation act before it’s too late.”
From there, Sir Keir kept up his new-found momentum, with the packed audience responding with more standing ovations, before flagging slightly towards the end.
It wasn’t ex-Chancellor Gordon Brown stomping around Blackpool’s Winter Gardens with a tub-thumping speech, with an under-current of “I’d make a better leader than Tony Blair”, or his later speeches as PM.
Nor was it Tony Blair outdoing Brown the next day with more dynamism, style and reaching out beyond Labour’s core to Middle England, showing why he was a triple election winner, putting Brown back in his place, with the internal TB-GB warfare simmering in the background.
But it was noticeably better and more confident than last year when Sir Keir addressed a divided party, responding to a heckler to slap down the Labour Left as he pushed ahead with burying the Corbyn era.
Taking a far stronger step on Tuesday, as he seeks to make Labour electable again, he pledged “country first, party second”.
He moved on from the Ed Miliband years of over-hope that the British people were being attracted swiftly to the Labour torch amid the impact of globalisation, rather than the party moving more decisively to them.
His speech was still light on policy, apart from mainly the Great British Energy announcement which captured the mood on the cost-of-living crisis, against energy giants raking it in, and Labour seeking to wrap itself in the Union Flag.
But it was heavy on Blairism with the march to the centre-ground, even quoting Sir Tony as Labour needing to be the “political wing of the British people”.
It was almost as if Blair’s former spin doctor Lord Mandelson had a hand in the speech.
This was denied but he was at the conference.
What was clear is Sir Keir’s party is increasingly behind him, hardly a squeak from the Left.
The British people may also be starting to listen to him and while the door of No10 may still be in the distance, he certainly now needs no binoculars.
