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Labour is 10 percentage points behind populist insurgents Reform UK in opinion polls, with a recent survey suggesting the party will be routed at the next general election and reduced to just 100 MPs.
And yet many delegates at this week’s Labour conference struck an upbeat note as they basked in autumnal sunshine in Liverpool’s docklands.
“Last year we were just getting used to being in government, we had been shouting from the sidelines for 14 years, and we were in shock,” said one senior Labour figure. “We’d forgotten that being in government means taking unpopular decisions. Now we are a little more battle-hardened.”
An apparent coup attempt by Labour’s “king of the north”, Andy Burnham, showed signs of fizzling out after the mayor of Greater Manchester repeatedly criticised Sir Keir Starmer’s government before eventually professing loyalty to the prime minister.
“If the conference had been 10 days earlier, the atmosphere would have been terrible, but the Burnham revolt seems to have galvanised people behind Keir,” said one former Labour MP.
Starmer on Wednesday insisted he would fulfil the five-year “mandate” he won at last year’s general election to “change the country”.
“I recognise the frustrations that in 12 months we’ve not been able to undo 14 years of failure,” he told Times Radio. “[But] I never said that was possible.”
Many attendees felt energised by Starmer’s message that Britain’s progressives were now locked in an existential fight with Reform for the country’s future. During his speech on Tuesday, the prime minister fired up the auditorium with his promise to take the “fight” to Reform over its plan to deport immigrants with long-term settled status.
He rejected the idea that Britain was somehow “broken”, despite having made similar noises himself when he took over from the Tories last summer.
Behind the public smiles at conference, however, there was still lingering resentment among some ministers over Starmer’s reshuffle at the start of September. Designed to revitalise his flagging administration and triggered by the forced exit of former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner, the revamp left a trail of disappointment, irritation and confusion at the highest levels.
One shuffled minister said the moves had “not made any sense” to MPs and had left a “heady mix” of people angry with Downing Street.
Some of the appointments had clear intent. By making Shabana Mahmood home secretary, Starmer has cleared the way for digital ID cards — opposed by her predecessor, Yvette Cooper — and a tougher line on immigration set out at conference this week.
“The reshuffle was a shift to the right, which definitely felt out of sync with Keir’s own instincts as a progressive,” said one cabinet minister.
Former leader of the Commons, Lucy Powell, was the only minister dropped from the cabinet completely rather than reshuffled sideways, but her sacking has allowed her to re-emerge as the leading candidate to replace Rayner as deputy party leader. If she wins, she will gain a platform and potentially become a thorn in the side of Starmer’s leadership.
Powell — an ally of Burnham — has already criticised the government on issues including the two-child benefit cap and will have her first public hustings against rival Bridget Phillipson, education secretary, at the conference on Wednesday.
Some business leaders gathered in Liverpool said they were still irritated that the well-liked Jonathan Reynolds had been moved out of the role of business secretary and into the position of chief whip. He was shifted to make way for Peter Kyle, one of the most “Blairite” figures in the cabinet, who was previously science secretary.
In his attempt to shift his cabinet to the right, Starmer sought to move Ed Miliband from the job of energy and climate change secretary, only for the former party leader to decline a move to housing secretary. Some conference delegates were jittery that this was an unsubtle attempt to downgrade Labour’s commitment to tackling climate change.
“It’s the worst reshuffle in living memory,” said one senior Labour figure, who said it had caused “massive unhappiness” among party MPs.
Buoyed by Starmer’s vigorous conference speech, however, many delegates heading back towards Liverpool’s Lime Street station had a spring in their step compared with last year’s miserable gathering.
Major obstacles lie ahead, the first of which is the Budget in November. Chancellor Rachel Reeves is expected to lift taxes by tens of billions of pounds — a hard political sell, given that she described last year’s tax-raising Budget as a one-off.
Labour is also already braced for a grim set of local elections in May. The party is expected to lose control of the Welsh Senedd for the first time since devolution, to struggle in Scotland and shed many council seats in London.
One minister said of Burnham’s attempted uprising and Starmer’s faltering leadership: “The man who wields the knife never wears the crown. But there are others waiting in the wings. The locals in May will be the really big test.”
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