So that's what makes Keir Starmer's upcoming Labour party conference speech so very different? Here's a prime minister just 14 months after a landslide victory, still sitting on a 148-seat overall majority but languishing with record low poll ratings and Nigel Farage's insurgent Reform party polling above Labour and the Tories combined.
If ever an inspirational platform speech by a prime minister so soon after a thumping election win was ever needed, it's next Tuesday. Unfortunately, inspirational oratory is Keir Starmer's Achilles heel. Which helps to explain why there will be more than a hint of despair, even panic, in the Liverpool conference air and the talk of a leadership challenge to replace the prime minister has grown from a whisper to a very audible buzz, not just among the membership and backbench MPs but within ministerial ranks too.
Elated or deflated?
As one cabinet minister succinctly confided: “Keir's future hinges on whether his speech leaves the party feeling elated or deflated.”
Even loyalist MPs predict that if next May's local elections in Scotland, Wales and London go as badly as the current polling indicates, the pressure on Sir Keir to resign or face a leadership challenge will become irresistible. Some even suggest it could happen by Christmas, but that seems fanciful.
A reason why so much media and delegate focus will be on the presence of Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham in Liverpool. Certainly the popular ‘King of the North’ appears to be on early manoeuvres and a couple of supportive northern MPs with safe seats are strongly rumoured to be ready to step down to open the door to Burnham's necessary parliamentary return.
Andy Burnham's leadership manoeuvres became more overt than anticipated just days before Starmer's tricky conference. The Daily Telegraph's Thursday splash was Burnham telling it MPs were privately urging him to challenge Starmer while he also gave a highly critical assessment of the Labour leadership strategy to the New Statesman magazine.
Inevitably Britain's right-wing papers are revelling in the government's woes, divisions and plotting. But it's the mood music among Labour's normally sympathetic titles that should worry Starmer and his Number 10 team more. They share the view that the prime minister is in deep personal trouble, along with his government, and that Starmer's conference speech is critical, a potential make-or-break moment for his premiership.
The Observer's political editor Rachel Sylvester's article last Sunday was headlined, ‘Starmer ready to seize the initiative in race against time to save his leadership’, but she quoted one senior unnamed party figure's damning depiction of “Downing Street's incapacity for direction or strategy — despite the multiple lieutenants with the words ‘director’ or ‘strategy’ in their titles. He can't duck this. It's febrile”. A former minister is quoted as saying it's “terminal” for the prime minister: “He was dealt a bad hand but he's also played it so badly. The parliamentary Labour party is incandescent.” A Labour peer put it more bluntly still: “Unless something changes, Starmer will be gone by the end of next year. He's neither a politician nor a leader.”
The New Statesman's September 22 edition main headline asked: ‘Can Keir Starmer defend his left flank?’. Senior writer George Eaton drew a reminder of how Starmer used his 2018 party conference speech as a shadow cabinet minister to undermine Jeremy Corbyn's leadership but is now “seeking to ensure he does not suffer the same fate.”
Eaton acknowledged that while Starmer's decision to recognise Palestinian statehood was indeed a “moral responsibility”, it was “also a decision driven by politics. More than a third of the cabinet, including David Lammy, Yvette Cooper, Shabana Mahmood and Ed Miliband had privately been pushing Starmer to act for some time with over 130 Labour MPs demanding it in a letter to the PM,” reported Eaton.
Certainly, failing to do so would have triggered fury and open revolt among conference delegates. (*For my own part, it was the right thing to do, albeit purely symbolic in the present circumstances. But sometimes symbolism really does matter).
The September 23 Guardian carried a lengthy piece by political reporting duo Jessica Elgot and Pippa Crerar headlined, ‘Keir Starmer to launch progressive fightback against ‘decline and division’ fuelled by far right’. They spotlighted how “even senior loyalists have voiced fears that he has not mounted a passionate enough attack on Reform UK and rising racism in Britain”. Also that “Number 10 had previously seemed unwilling to directly criticise a number of controversial Reform proposals over the summer, including plans for the mass detention and deportation of migrants, scrapping the Human Rights Act and withdrawing from the European convention on human rights.”
Slow on the response
It quoted Sarah Owen, chair of the women and equalities select committee, attacking Nigel Farage's headline hitting migration plan this week as “morally repugnant, economic madness... the public believe in fairness and mutual respect, not this Trumpian policy. We are not America — we must resist this dangerous turn in British politics.”
The Elgot / Crerar article also featured how many Labour MPs had “expressed anger and dismay at the slowness of Number 10's response to the ‘unite the kingdom’ nationalist march a fortnight ago, fronted by the far-right activist Tommy Robinson and addressed by Elon Musk.” (*The beamed in Musk speech with its talk of violence and overthrowing the UK government just about stayed on the right side of free speech versus criminal incitement.)
It belatedly prompted Starmer to issue a strongly worded statement saying the UK “would never surrender its flag to far right agitators” and to pen an op-ed in the Sun newspaper about “a struggle for the heart and soul of our nation”. For some delegates the choice of Liverpool again for the conference still plays badly, given the toxic legacy of Hillsborough.
But how far will the prime minister dare go in attacking Farage and Reform over its Trumpian vision of Britain when he steps up onto that conference platform and can he suddenly emerge as the inspirational orator are questions taxing many Labour MPs.
Envying Sir Ed
One senior minister told me privately how much he envied LibDem leader's conference speech on Tuesday when he urged voters “not to let Donald Trump's America become Nigel Farage's Great Britain”. Confided my minister source: “It's the warning Keir should have been shouting out forcefully for months and hopefully he'll be as outspoken as Davey on the conference stage next week, hopefully but I'm not counting on it.”
Sir Ed Davey's attack certainly struck a nerve with Farage and Reform who promptly issued a statement accusing the LibDem leader of “spouting total madness”. But Davey has a point that Starmer and his team would do well to pick up... that for all Reform's poll surge, UK public opinion of Trump is overwhelmingly negative and the more the party and Farage personally roll out Trumpian policies and Farage himself expresses admiration for his longtime friend The Donald and can be branded the ‘British Trump’ by opponents, the greater the prospect of Reform suffering a backlash. As this column has reported before, that's a prospect even worrying some Reform election strategists privately, if not yet Farage himself.
The Elgot / Crerar Guardian article rightly reported that Starmer (so often accused of aloofness by his backbenchers) has begun ahead of conference to “spend significantly more time taking soundings from MPs after a fortnight of turmoil, including losing the deputy leader, Angela Rayner, the US ambassador , Peter Mandelson, as well as a senior strategy aide, to a series of scandals that cast doubt on his leadership”. How well or not that effort has worked we might get to know by the end of next week.
Enter the King of the North
Both Angela Rayner and Andy Burnham will be present at conference with Number 10 nervously hoping they aren't embraced by delegates as lightning rods for discontent with the prime minister. Rayner, still hugely popular with the rank-and-file and seen as a colossal loss as an election campaigner, will probably — but not certainly — refrain from criticising the leadership unless there are clear signs of her workers’ rights bill being watered down. While Burnham, seen as the political hero of the Hillsborough family's long campaign for justice, is likely to restrict lobbying to behind-the-scenes activity rather than any overt, headline-sparking public criticism of Starmer, but some MPs and delegates are urging Burnham to mount a more public conference criticism of the leadership.
But while the state of the economy, Rachel Reeves’ November Budget, stamp duty reform, changes to council tax evaluation, the future of the pension triple lock and pressure for abolishing the two-child benefit cap are predictable issues to be debated on or off stage (*calls for a formal debate on the two-child benefit cap has been blocked by the leadership, despite briefings that the treasury is working hard on how to fund abolishing it) other less predictable, personal perils will lurk at conference.
Lobbying at conference in the ongoing election contest for the deputy leadership of the party vacated by Angela Rayner will be intense. Pitching Number 10's preference, cabinet minister Bridget Phillipson against recently sacked cabinet minister, Burnham ally Lucy Powell. Both Northern MPs whose political philosophies aren't that different. But Ms Powell seems to be surging ahead in polling largely on the basis that she's not Number 10's favourite and can be an ‘independent’ voice in the role. Not exactly good news for Sir Keir.
But the biggest personal peril factor increasingly surrounds the prime minister's controversial chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. Even before his role in persuading the prime minister to appoint his guru Lord Mandelson Our Man in Washington fully emerged in the ‘Epstein Connection’ scandal, McSweeney's popularity with MPs was sliding.
What to do about a problem named McSweeney?
Now, however, a new and different email trail is engulfing McSweeney — and potentially Starmer himself — in a complex new ‘scandal’. It centres on how McSweeney, while running the Labour Together think tank, spent over £700,000 on polling and research in support of Sir Keir's original campaign for the Labour leadership but failed to declare it as required by law. Neither did it appear on Starmer's 2020 parliamentary register of interests. In 2021, the think-tank was fined by the Electoral Commission watchdog over 20 breaches of electoral law involving undeclared donations.
But, in harness with investigations by the Daily Mail and Times, the Conservative party claim that new email discoveries show the commission was misled and weren't given the full facts. They are now demanding a police investigation into McSweeney personally and the Labour Together operation he ran at the time. It also features in a new book, ‘Get In’ written by leading Times political journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund and billed as ‘The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer’. While Wednesday's Daily Mail preferred to splash on McSweeney rather than Donald Trump's extraordinary United Nations speech under the headline ‘EMAIL DAMNS STARMER’S TOP AIDE IN £740,000 DONATIONS ROW... Tories demand police probe into Morgan McSweeney and ‘hidden funding’ for Sir Keir’.
To put it mildly, the timing is unfortunate for the prime minister. Not least given the Tories, Reform and the LibDems all plan to press for ‘full disclosure’ of all documents, correspondence et al relating to Mandelson's ambassadorial appointment despite his known close friendship with the late paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Eptstein, including McSweeney's alleged key role.
As one senior Labour grandee told me on Wednesday: “The biggest favour Morgan could do Keir during conference week would be to announce his resignation.”
On Thursday, the prime minister's Morgan McSweeney problem deepened still further with another Daily Mail splash, this time citing evidence that McSweeney was told by the Electoral Commission that all donations had to be declared but allegedly ignored it.
No escaping the shadow (curse?) of the Donald
Even before his extraordinary, fiery and often ramblingly incoherent speech to mark the United Nations’ 80th anniversary, Donald Trump was the divisive, inescapable spectre hanging over Labour's party conference.
Despite the much-hyped state visit ‘pledge’ of a future £150bn US big tech AI investment in the UK, many Labour MPs were raising serious questions about what demands would be made to water down the UK's online harm legislation opposed by both Trump and his tech titan allies; how the massive data centres needing to be built could swallow up land that could have gone to home building; how Britain's seriously strained national grid and other infrastructure systems could deal with the immense water supply ‘suck up’ that would be required; would energy bills rise rather than fall as a result; would the huge jobs bonanza boasts really deliver?
For many backbenchers and delegates, the flattery, fawning and great pals act put on between Starmer and Trump was cringeworthy even if pragmatic. For others, a queasy feeling about King Charles and the other royals being recruited by the prime minister into indulging this most narcissistic, unpredictable, unreliable POTUS ever to an unprecedented second state visit in the hope the pomp, ceremony, glittering Windsor Castle banquet and four-poster bed might guarantee us his future favour.
Watching it all, my mind flash backed to a column I wrote shortly after Trump's last election victory headlined, ‘Enter the age of ‘King’ Donald the All-Powerful’ predicting how in his second term, he would seek to be more absolute monarch than conventional president. I based it on once knowing him pretty well personally but more on his rush to appoint often unqualified courtiers to key jobs because of their unquestioning loyalty and support on Fox News, etc.
The very dangerous RFK
Witness, too, his appointment of RFK junior as US health secretary to the horror of the great majority of US medical and scientific professionals. Only this week, Kennedy was the prime influencer behind Trump's global headline / panic inducing pronouncement linking paracetamol with autism in children and warning pregnant women not to take the hitherto trusted painkiller. It was an out of the blue TV appearance by Trump based on no credible scientific research and swiftly debunked by the vast majority of American and international experts, with UK health secretary Wes Streeting urging the public to “take no notice of Trump” on health issues.
On Capitol Hill there are whispers the autism scare conference was rushed out to divert attention from anticipated new media revelations about Trump's past connections to Jeffrey Epstein. But the rumoured story never surfaced.
Meanwhile in Britain, Nigel Farage is under fierce attack from other political parties after he refused to disassociate himself from Trump's autism claims. With Tory leader Kemi Badenoch accusing him of irresponsibly promoting “conspiracy theory nonsense”.
A UN address like no other
Which brings us to that UN anniversary speech on Tuesday, billed in advance by his own press secretary as a major foreign policy speech. It was scheduled to last 15 minutes (the same time allotted to all the attendant leaders’ speeches). Instead it became a fiery but frequently incoherent 57-minute I-am-the-greatest ramble that sometimes almost conjured up memories of Joe Biden in his declining days.
A Times inside page spread headline captured it well with, ‘Lecture careened from climate hoax to sharia in London’. Although the Times splash headline was, ‘Shoot down Russian jets in NATO’s sky, says Trump’. Remarkably that didn't figure in POTUS’ speech but came via a remark to a reporter who caught him on his way into a meeting with Ukraine's President Zelensky, another attendee. But, on-stage, Trump ridiculed Russia's failure to defeat Ukraine and said it was looking like a paper tiger. Later, in a pivotal shift, he lauded Zelensky as a ‘brave man’ and that he now believed Ukraine could win back all the territory seized by Putin.
Naturally, Zelensky was delighted in public although privately some Ukrainian officials couldn't help but wonder whether Trump would still be feeling the same way next week or whether he would commit the military resources (via sales to Europe) to make it possible. Or whether his heavily caveated threat to impose draconian sanctions on Russia will ever make the trip from rhetoric to reality.
Much of Trump's speech, his first to the UN general assembly in seven years, was anticipated, including backing Netanyahu over Gaza and condemning those UN members, including Britain, for recognising a Palestinian state. Just as he had at his UK state visit press conference, the president (rightly) called for the release of the Gaza hostages but without a single direct reference to the civilian deaths (65,000) and many thousands of life-changing injuries Israel's military action has inflicted.
The greatest hoax in history?
Climate change, he declared and not for the first time, is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated” on the world ... a “scam” with “carbon footprint a hoax made up by people with evil intentions”.
Even those UN officials braced for a Trumpian tongue-lashing were taken aback when he went as far as far as accusing the UN of ‘funding’ criminal illegal migrants who had ‘invaded’ America.
While London Mayor Sadiq Khan might have been surprised that Trump's hostility warranted a UN speech reference, with the false claim Khan is seeking to impose sharia law on the capital. That certainly won’t play well with Labour conference delegates already furious over Trump's claim that the mayor wasn't invited to the state visit banquet at his insistence.
Inevitably, too, Trump's speech included his heavily exaggerated claim of having settled seven wars this year, boasting, “It's sad I had to do these things instead of the United Nations”, shamelessly tossing in “Everyone says I should get the Nobel peace prize for each one of these achievements.”
Absent from the speech, however, was any serious mention of ‘free speech’... But no such inhibition later that evening as Disney / ABC restored Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show to the air. The president used his Truth Social platform to condemn the broadcaster, saying he “couldn't believe” the decision and saying he would use his presidential power to sue the media giant. He also called on the network's local affiliate stations to refuse to screen it.
So much then for ‘free speech’ an issue on which Trump and his proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist’ VP, JD Vance, campaigned, accusing the UK government of killing free speech. With their UK cheerleader Nigel Farage telling a US congressional hearing recently that Britain is the free speech equivalent of North Korea. To adopt the words of Jonn McEnroe, ‘Nigel, you cannot be serious’.
Meanwhile, for me personally, the most poignant moment of the week came when Erika Kirk, widow of the murdered Christian ultra conservative campaigner Charlie Kirk, tearfully told the massive crowd at his memorial service that she ‘forgave’ the young man accused of shooting him dead. (Like me, you can largely disagree with Kirk's views while also seeing his assassination as an horrific betrayal of the free speech principle he campaigned on and which helped convert young followers to becoming Trump voters.)
The least poignant moment? The one when Donald Trump himself followed her on stage, effectively disowning her forgiveness message and boasting how he preferred to “hate my enemies”.
Worth remembering, too, the words of Trump to reporters on Air Force One on the flight home from his state visit... that broadcasters who weren't positive about him should lose their licences, hardly the words of a free speech champion. Or defender of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. But on Capitol Hill there are even Republican politicians who fear that in his obsessive urge to establish an American autocracy, ‘King’ Donald would love the power to amend the First Amendment.
