The hottest ticket at Labour conference – after Andy Burnham’s speech – was an afterparty in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, headlined with a set by the noughties girlband Sugababes. As Labour activists and ministers belted out the lyrics under pink spotlights, it was hard not to draw some parallels with the party’s recent history. There have been painful lineup changes and a lot of internal division, but this week onstage in Liverpool the originals are back together and they only played the hits.
The fans can’t get enough. Burnham’s own show on the main stage had the conference hall in raptures not because of Brexit or social care but because of the display of raw emotion after the tightly choreographed repression of the last six years. He may as well have walked across the stage with his feet crunching over the debris of shattered Ming vases.
The speech combined plans that had been forming inside Burnham’s head for the last decade as well as seat-of-his-pants political instinct. On the morning of the conference, the prime minister took off early for a morning jog and then returned to make final amendments. Even moments before he went on stage, he was still rewriting, aides said.
About a quarter of the speech was entirely ad-libbed. When Burnham was rehearsing the speech, aides said, he knew he was going to cry when he got to the paragraph about his late father – he never managed to get through any of the practice runs without tears. But the long pause as he composed himself was the most emotional he had been.
Several ministers said they themselves had been moved to tears, including Ed Miliband, who had recently lost his mother, as well as Louise Haigh and Anneliese Midgley, who are Burnham’s closest friends in government and the architects of his ascendancy. After his speech, Burnham gathered all his ministers for a private pep talk. He said he knew they would not agree with everything, but – with the aura of a general sending his troops into battle – he told them to “get out there” and fight for it.
He said he would not send them out with “a pea-shooter” – they needed proper weapons for the fight ahead and he promised he would provide them. In the hallway outside the conference hall, minister after minister spoke with voices quivering with emotion. The bar for speeches from political leaders has been low for the past decade or more.
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