THE ideal party conference - especially if you've just won a massive landslide just a few months ago - should be unmemorable.
Unmemorable for attendees because much of the activity centres on having prodigious amounts to drink in celebration of said election victory.
Unmemorable for the public because they just voted these people in and don’t want to hear much more from them for the next few years, thank you very much.
Labour’s conference, which wrapped up in Liverpool earlier this week, was memorable. That is not good news for them.
Think back to memorable party conference moments over the last few years.
There’s Theresa May dancing like a malfunctioning android at the 2018 Conservative Party conference.
Cherie Blair was caught calling Gordon Brown a liar during the Labour conference in 2006.
Needless to say, things did not go well for May or Brown in the years to come.
A good party conference should go like this: Get to the venue, listen to some boring people, mad people, or both speak at the fringe events, have some lunch, see some boring people, mad people, or both give speeches, then pub.
It should be little to write home about. Labour delegates, to their great misfortune, had rather a lot to write home about this year.
What about Keir Starmer (above) demanding Hamas return the “sausages” from Gaza?
Or Anas Sarwar’s excruciating dad dancing during a TikTok-sponsored party?
Or an embarrassing defeat for the leadership on their cut to the Winter Fuel Payment, as unruly members voted to condemn the policy?
Or every single senior Labour politician being forced to answer embarrassing questions, not about any part of their policy programme, but about their proclivity for hoovering up freebies?
The sausages thing was so cringeworthy it might have saved the Tory Party’s bacon just a tiny bit in the election had it happened last year, I reckon.
The union defeat was an upset but a fairly minor one given that those direct debits are still flowing into Labour’s bank account.
But the gifts story is the headache that just won’t go away. A party that spent years telling the public they would be better than the Tories has been found out to be on the take from day one.
It doesn’t exactly scream “strong and stable” if more or less every story on the political agenda is some variation on the precise value of Taylor Swift tickets gifted to ministers.
Labour’s default setting as a political party is losing General Elections to the Conservatives. When they’re not doing that, their standard is winning an election against the Conservatives, then getting booted out of office after just one term.
Mere months ago, Labour seemed to be untouchable – now they are in the gutter, disastrously unpopular and, depending on how the Budget goes, potentially about to become even more so.
That being said, we are in the very early days of this Labour Government. Perhaps they can turn it around. Starmer might be nearing the end of the crash course in “how to do politics” that you’d assume No 10 put him on.
But is there any indication things might start looking up for our already beleaguered PM? Not a sausage.
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