Labour is either shameless or stupid – close inspection at party conference suggests both
Some people would say that after the last week of headlines, to begin Labour’s conference with a video about the evils of cronyism in the Tory party would suggest that they’re either shameless or stupid. As somebody who is there on the ground, I can absolutely assure you that close inspection suggests they are both.
“Oink, oink, oink” went the Cabinet around the TV channels as the conference began in Liverpool. This little piggy went to New York, this little piggy got new glasses, this little piggy cried “change change change” all the way home. Alas, Sir Keir had weightier things to do than attend the customary BBC interview and risk an interrogation about his free gift addiction: another measurement of his ample bottom for some tailor-made trousers perhaps? Suits you, Sir Keir!
Instead, we were treated to an agonising grilling of Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, about her 40th birthday party, which was, obviously, paid for by Lord Alli. But Freebie Phillipson’s interrogation didn’t end there: “I was very much there in my capacity as Education Secretary,” she stammered, of the Wimbledon tickets she’d also received. Is Novak Djokovic joining Ofsted? The Duke of Kent sitting GCSE chemistry? Surely we must be told. “What about the Taylor Swift concert?” snapped Kay Burley. No more convincing answers were forthcoming. A D-minus for effort.
Things were scarcely better on the ground. There was the usual gaggle of weirdos; prune-faced party apparatchiks, middle-aged people with pink hair, shiny-suited lobbyists, bearded men wearing trilbies indoors, trade union reps in soggy macintoshes. The Dignity in Dying tent was beginning to look appealing.
Meanwhile, on the main stage the people who run this intensely boring charade – presumably defrosted from the shoebox in which they live for the rest of the year – droned on and on about arcane party protocol. We heard about CAC priority ballots, composite meetings, “staggered start-times for the submitting of motions for affiliate delegates”. Ellie Reeves delivered a particularly soporific preamble, exhaustively detailing her rise from CLP rep to party chair within a few years. The Labour faithful somehow manage to be simultaneously completely mad and unbelievably dull.
There were further self-congratulations for Rachel Reeves for being the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer. Our Playmobil-haired financial overlord smiled the smuggest of smug smiles.
Elsewhere, Angela Rayner promised to “finish the job” of devolution. (More Sturgeons, Khans and Drakefords; fasten your seatbelts.) Still, the crowd loved it. “Well done Angie!” yelled a woman behind me, which is presumably also what the people at the House of Commons register of interest office shout when a claim for another billowing trouser suit comes in.
Finally – last and absolutely least – we came to international joke David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. “My job is to tell a new story about the United Kingdom abroad, a story of openness, of the future, of hope”, he said. I’d suggest that accidentally painting the ethnic cleansing of Armenians as “liberation” is more Lord Palmerston than Cool Britannia but there we are.
As always with Lammy, a man who is barely on nodding acquaintance with reality, there was a lot of brass neck here too. The Foreign Secretary lambasted the Conservatives for “handing out crony contracts to their mates”. It was as if all the speeches had been written pre-donorgate, and no one had thought to amend them.
His slow on-stage death reached its apogee when he got the crowd to chant back at him: “Britain is back!”. Buoyed by the modest success of this he tried to get them to do the same with the cry “Climate matters!” but to no avail. As embarrassing as it is to even type the words, David Lammy, Foreign Secretary, I suspect that we are going to get a lot more laughs from him and his hopelessly out-of-depth colleagues as the week progresses.
