Just forget about the last two years, after the party won a historic majority but where the mood never matched the achievement. Now, as conference delegates and MPs filed out of the hall after Andy Burnham’s first speech as prime minister, it was close to euphoria. Where the hell have you been all our lives?
What have we been doing – when you were right there all along? That feeling rarely lasts: Burnham himself warned he would make choices that would be a harsh comedown from this Labour high. But the “people pleaser” prime minister said he was prepared to weather the worst political pain to change the country.
In his sights are some of the most untouchable topics in British politics: social care, the triple lock, Brexit, public control of water and council homes and changing the voting system. Burnham wrote the speech almost entirely alone, working on it until the very last minute. Cabinet ministers have been full of tales of how often meetings overrun with the new prime minister, clearing their diaries for the extra half an hour, because of his desire to chew the fat, to understand, to argue, to persuade.
Close friends saw the speech just the night before, as Burnham reworked it. But strategists in No 10 were very clear that the new prime minister did need to introduce himself, his story, to the country that barely knows him. Each judicious choice of an anecdote from his past drew on his personal history to explain his desire to make fundamental change.
The home in Old Roan in Merseyside bought by his grandmother Kitty, which gave his family security that the younger generation cannot now experience: sold, he explained, to pay for Kitty’s care, which he will promise future generations will never happen under a new national care service. The care of his dad, Roy, who died two weeks ago, and his promise to his care workers that he would elevate their profession. Burnham was overcome with emotion at the moment he spoke about his father, pausing for so long it caused one member of the audience to cry out: “You can do it Andy.” They want to back him, they want to believe.
Unusually for a conference speech, Burnham did not use the speech to attack his opponents. There were no reference to either Kemi Badenoch or Nigel Farage. But one of the loudest cheers came from the crowd as Burnham drew the dividing line with the right in the starkest terms on public ownership.
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