LIVERPOOL, England — A parade of top politicians from the governing Labour Party headed through the doors of the POLITICO Pub during the party’s annual conference in Liverpool Monday — with plenty more to come. Labour is in a chipper mood after swapping out unpopular leader Keir Starmer for the telegenic, hopey-changey Andy Burnham. But there’s a hard road ahead: a high-stakes budget arrives in exactly a month, and Nigel Farage’s right-populist outfit Reform UK remains just two points behind Labour in the national opinion polls, according to our aggregator.
Here are the snap takeaways from a flurry of frank conversations down the (travelling) POLITICO local. Britain’s new PM goes into his big conference speech Tuesday with at least one reason to feel cheerful: he seems to have dramatically shifted the British public’s view of politics itself. A majority of Brits say they believe his Labour Party has a real chance of winning the next election, whenever it comes.
That’s the verdict of a new POLITICO Poll from Public First, unveiled at the pub Monday, and which captures the state of play after Burnham’s first two months as prime minister. It found 53% of voters believe Labour has a realistic shot at keeping power. That is a big increase from 33% in May — when Starmer was in the final stages of his doomed premiership.
That was reflected in a bullish pub take from Lucy Powell, the Labour Party’s deputy leader. She told POLITICO she expects Labour to keep hold of the Holborn and St. Pancras seat at the upcoming parliamentary by-election triggered by Starmer’s exit from the political scene.
Caveat alert: Powell felt pretty chirpy about the Gorton and Denton by-election – where the party under Starmer lost to the Greens — too. In the latest sign Labour can’t quite get over its 1990s heyday, two more Cabinet ministers revealed that former PM Gordon Brown is in regular contact with them. After Chancellor John Healey shed light on his own advice from Brown over the weekend, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the POLITICO Pub he and Brown’s most recent interaction was a phone chat while Miliband was in New York at the U.N.
Previously domestic-focused ministers Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting – both from rival schools in the Labour movement — are now turning their attention to the world outside Westminster and getting pinned down on the specifics. In back-to-back POLITICO Pub interviews, Miliband — a Labour veteran who is now the U.K.’s foreign secretary — signalled a split with the Trump administration on the U.S. president’s bid to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G20 in Miami. And he risked disappointing some of his supporters on Labour’s soft-left by batting away suggestions the U.K. should stump up reparations to Commonwealth nations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.
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