Hope Again is the conference slogan. But what felt even more apt was Try Again.
Just forget about the last two years, after the party won a historic majority but where the mood never matched the achievement. Now, as conference delegates and MPs filed out of the hall after Andy Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, it was close to euphoria. Where the hell have you been all our lives? What have we been doing – when you were right there all along?
That feeling rarely lasts: Burnham himself warned he would make choices that would be a harsh comedown from this Labour high. But the “people pleaser” prime minister said he was prepared to weather the worst political pain to change the country.
In his sights are some of the most untouchable topics in British politics – social care, the triple lock, Brexit, public control of water and council homes and changing the voting system.
Burnham wrote the speech almost entirely alone, working on it until the very last minute. Cabinet ministers have been full of tales of how often meetings overrun with the new prime minister, clearing their diaries for the extra half an hour, because of his desire to chew the fat, to understand, to argue, to persuade.
Close friends saw the speech just the night before, as Burnham reworked it. But strategists in Number 10 were very clear that the new prime minister did need to introduce himself, his story, to the country who barely know him.
Each judicious choice of an anecdote from his past drew on his personal history to explain his desire to make fundamental change. The home in Old Roan in Merseyside bought by his grandmother Kitty, which gave his family security that the younger generation cannot now experience: sold, he explained, to pay for Kitty’s care, which he will promise future generations will never happen under a new national care service. The care of his dad, Roy, who died two weeks ago, and his promise to his care workers that he would elevate their profession.
Burnham was overcome with emotion at the moment he spoke about his father, pausing for so long it caused one member of the audience to cry out: “You can do it Andy.” They want to back him, they want to believe.
Unusually for a conference speech, Burnham did not use the speech to attack his opponents. There were no reference to either Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage. But one of the loudest cheers came from the crowd as Burnham drew the dividing line with the right in the starkest terms on public ownership.
“The British right talk about ‘taking back control’. Never let them forget, they are the ones that gave it away in the first place,” he said, the reddest of red meat to a jubilant Labour crowd.
So, was it Burnham – and Labour – unleashed? No, because the prime minister is still constrained by his own party manifesto and the state of the public finances. “I would love to go quicker,” he said. “But I have to be honest about what the country can afford.”
His most radical promises are promises deferred. The party will overhaul the triple lock by 2030, the national care service can only be paid for if the party ditches its tax pledges, it can only explore a customs union, the single market, even rejoining, outside the manifesto’s “red lines”.
Even at this most united Labour conference the party has seen in two decades, there remains a proud Labour tradition – pessimism. And there are causes for concern, which creep in when cabinet minsters are at their most candid. The first is the impatience of the country for change – and that being told to wait will not be enough.
People, they say, are suffering now. The budget will need to show that any sparse funds that remain must be delivered to giving people relief from everyday costs.
“People need to start feeling actual benefits next year. We have got less time than we might think,” one cabinet minister said.
The second is a fear that Labour is not speaking to a broad enough base, no matter the elevation in Liverpool. Though there has been a discernible “Burnham bounce”, the polls are volatile. A YouGov poll on the eve of Burnham’s speech put Reform UK back in first place by a tiny margin.
Labour is reuniting a progressive coalition with a divided right, which is an advantage but which is unlikely to put them in majority territory. There are few cabinet ministers who are so frustrated with the constraints of their own legacy manifesto who want to swap that for the constraints of a Lib Dem manifesto. There is no sign of revival yet in Wales or Scotland, so crucial to a Labour majority government.
When the dust clears and Labour strategists pick over the bodies of the sacred cows that Burnham promised to slay in his speech, many will probably wonder why he didn’t choose an easier life.
But perhaps now Burnham has waited this long to be prime minister – and watched so many others squander the office – he knows he has no choice but to tool up for the fight.
