This Labour conference was supposed to be a victory parade, Emperor Starmer’s Merseyside durbar.
Instead, people are tiptoeing round the cavernous venue with eyes to the floor, wearing faintly car-sick grimaces. The only smilers are on the euthanasia trade-stand, but I’m giving them a swerve.
When Sir Keir arrived with Angela Rayner – she of the complimentary Manhattan apartment – they were greeted by a gaggle of youths who did their best to whoop.
Then a reporter, her voice cutting through the mist, shouted from the back ‘should you have taken those freebies, Prime Minister?’ Shoulders slumped.
Allowing someone else to buy your troosers: it’s all just a touch Timothy Lumsden, really. Tacky and dependent.
As the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg put it in a bruising morning TV joust with Ms Rayner, ‘why do politicians get free stuff?’ Big Angela, pale as tripe, argued that she was working-class and therefore ‘had to accept donations’.
Her holiday in New York was with a beau who was at that point a Labour MP. Ms Rayner referred to him as ‘the other person’.
Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Angela Rayner (right) during the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on September 22, 2024
When questioned about Lord Alli’s freebies, Ms Rayner (pictured) said she was working class and ‘had to accept donations’
Had she truly been transparent? ‘I went beyond the rules,’ she replied with accidental honesty. She sought, three times, to reject the ‘caricature’ of politicians on the take.
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Her false teeth, alas, were in no mood to cooperate and it came out as ‘cariktachore’, ‘carrotachewer’ and ‘carackt-achoo’. Miss Kuenssberg: ‘Gesundheit.’
Of working with colleagues in the Treasury and the business department, our new Deputy Prime Minister drew herself to her full munificence and announced ‘I’ll be collegiant’. Sue Gray (lucky devil) is not here. Can she survive? ‘I think so,’ said Angela. Grumpy Sue will remember that and file it under T for treachery.
The exhibition hall is bigger than the Autumn Show in Malvern. Instead of ericaceous compost, garden trugs and trowels, the stands here are peddling connections, business cards and ‘must do lunch’.
You can take your pick from PR firms run by Blairites, trade unions, the Cuba Solidarity campaign, anti-monarchists, rewilders, cycling zealots and filthy airports. Amid all these horrors, rather sweetly, is the British Toy and Hobby Association.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (left) and Prime Minister Sir Keir (right) arrived to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Supporters cheered before a journalist brought up the freebie scandal
Ms Rayner delivers a speech at the Labour Party Conference
Chief of Staff Sue Gray (pictured) is not in attendance at the conference in Liverpool
The Deputy Prime Minister was overwhelmed with emotion during her speech
Ellie Reeves speaks on the first full day of the Labour Party Conference
Ellie Reeves (left) and Chancellor Rachel Reeves (right) are indeed sisters
The conference began with a moving silence to the little girls killed in Southport. Then we heard from Ellie Reeves, also known as Lady Cryer because her ex-Labour MP husband has been booted up to the Lords.
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Her ladyship chairs the party and is the slightly less odd sister of Rachel Reeves. She accused the Tories of ‘destroying people’s faith in democracy’.
That might have worked better before all these tales about Lord Alli. Like other pre-cooked attack lines, it now felt a touch ripe.
A video labelled the Sunak regime ‘a government in moral decline’ and there was stuff about Boris Johnson’s birthday party. Well, okay.
But now that we know Lord Alli paid for a birthday party for that thigh-slapper Bridget Phillipson (who curled her lip in an interview on Sky News), the sleaze stuff just backfires.
The conference agenda committee, a notorious stitch-up body, is this year being chaired by a green-jacketed pudding called Lynne.
She struggled to read her speech. ‘Delegates should treat everyone with kindness and respect,’ she growled.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson squirmed today as she defended taking £14,000 from a millionaire Labour peer to host ‘work events’
Ms Phillipson was quizzed this morning over her own acceptance of donations from Lord Waheed Alli (pictured)
Foreign Secretary David Lammy gesticulates during his speech at the Labour Party Conference
A delegate called Dora Polenta jumped up to complain about this or that. She had such a thick Spanish accent, it was incomprehensible. Worse than Manuel in Fawlty Towers.
Lynne was invited to respond and won my new-found respect by pretending to have understood Comrade Polenta’s jabbering.
Ms Rayner gave a platform speech. By her standards it was low-key but she was more popular with the delegates than David Lammy, who spoke after lunch to a far-from-full hall.
He boogied around at the lectern, did plenty of shoulder-shrugging and waved both fists in the air as he enthused about Net Zero and international aid.
He kept saying ‘Britain is back’ – ten times or more – and claimed that the Government was going to put a stop to world poverty. The audience remained gluey.
Things can only get better.
