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More than half the Cabinet, accompanied by a swathe of other Labour luminaries, were at the Daily Mirror party deep in the bowels of Liverpool’s ACC centre on Tuesday night – finally able to let their hair down properly after a conference beset by media storms over freebies and real storms bringing torrential rain and squally winds.
The party reached fever pitch as the DJ played Freed From Desire and, inevitably, the Tony Blair-era anthem Things Can Only Can Only Get Better.
Things did get better for Labour over the five days of the conference – after a terrible start when Keir Starmer and his party machine failed inexplicably to move the media narrative away from revelations of Labour freebie-taking.
Key was the Prime Minister’s speech on Tuesday. Starting slowly – it reached its emotional high point with an attack on the racist populism of the far right.
It was typically Starmerish as it set out a path to better times ahead but warned there would be a price to pay: more electricity pylons, and prisons near residential communities, more homes built in places where locals believe there are more than enough already.
There was more than a flash of defiance at his critics. The Prime Minister hit out at ‘the bad faith advice from people who still hanker for the politics of noisy performance – it’s water off a duck’s back. Mere glitter on a shirt cuff,’ he said.
Appearing to blame the media for bad-news stories is rarely the best approach in politics.
You sometimes think Starmer and the team around him, battle-hardened from internal and external struggles, underestimate the near desperation on so many sides for his government to succeed and provide stability in an increasingly perilous world.
“If you don’t want Labour to do well at the moment, it means you don’t want the UK to do well,” one overseas-based business leader observed.
Shifting the dial
The corporate community – not without reason – were largely unimpressed by Labour’s £3,000-a-ticket Business Day with little access to ministers and speeches largely devoid of policies.
But Rachel Reeves’s media appearances and platform speech on Tuesday did mark a turning point in the mood of the conference as the Chancellor shifted the dial a tad towards an optimistic outlook.
Two major events over the next six weeks will form the building blocks for Reeves’s bid to give shape to her central slogan – that Britain is ‘open for business’ – the Investment Summit on 14 October and of course the Budget on 30 October.
The Chancellor is almost certain to tweak the government’s fiscal rules to allow more borrowing and spare key departments from painful spending cuts.
But by repeating Labour’s general election mantra that ‘working people’ would be protected and that her taxation policy would be ‘fair’, she was spelling out a clear warning: most of the burden would fall on the rich.
While final decisions will not be taken until the last minute, nothing the Chancellor said in Liverpool led observers to think that capital gains and inheritance taxes – for example – might somehow escape rises.
The new government finished its first party conference in power for 15 years in a better mood – and with rather better weather – than was the case at the start. But it is how badly the skies darken after 30 October that will be the real test.