The winners and losers of this year’s conference season

Conference season 2023 is done and dusted, with punchy Wes Streeting having performed the final significant act yesterday via his speech depicting Labour as the great engine of NHS reform.

How has it gone? Who has done best? Has it changed the political weather overall? Those who have attended all of it will have their view, but so do those of us who followed conference coverage and news bulletins from, as they say, ‘the comfort of our armchairs’.

These are my top ten TV takeaways:

1. Keir Starmer emerged personally strengthened. His unflappable demeanour during the ‘glittergate’ rumpus will have cut through with the electorate. He showed nerves of steel and an impressive determination not to be deflected from his major task by ‘that idiot’. To put it in Desmond Morris anthropological terms, the episode has finally made him a political ‘silverback’. It also helped that what followed was the best speech of his political career skilfully eviscerating the Tories and setting out a Labour programme of renewal in pretty reasonable terms. There was even the odd flicker of passion.

2. Rishi Sunak flopped. The Prime Minister set out to make a daring pivot on infrastructure by dumping the northern leg of HS2 and redeploying resources into scores of smaller projects. It was a good idea that could have taken off with the public, particularly in the crucial red wall seats where scepticism about a new ‘executive express’ to London ran strongest. Instead, it fell apart thanks to terrible execution. Several schemes listed in a new ‘Network North’ turned out to be defunct. Ultimately Sunak claimed that the new concept, set out in official Department for Transport documents, was intended to be merely ‘illustrative’. Just what is the use of an incremental technocrat if he has not nailed down the detail of major policy changes?  
3. Nigel Farage was Nigel Farage – by turns a consummate showman and rock-solid right-wing ideologue – and Tory activists and Tory-leaning voters loved it. Farage filled a Boris Johnson-shaped hole at the Conservative gathering. The contrast with underpowered Sunak, a leader with no mandate other than from Tory MPs and limited ability to connect with voters, was very telling.
4. Old hands on the Conservative front bench have all but given up. They have been trotting out low-energy turns in the manner of veteran footballers playing in a becalmed mid-table team late in the season and already psychologically ‘on the beach’. Nobody who watched Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s speech, for instance, could have thought this was a guy who expects to be steering the British economy for very much longer.
5. Labour’s frontbench is up for it and growing in confidence. By contrast with Hunt, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves was firing on all cylinders. So was Streeting, who is cleverly amplifying the notion that only Labour can reform the NHS via an ‘only Nixon could go to China’ argument. While it is true that the current Labour top team is no match for the ‘big beasts’ that Tony Blair took in to the 1997 election, it really doesn’t have to be given the poor state of the Tory front bench.
6. The enormous level of legal immigration remains the great unmentionable for both main party leaders. Neither dwelt on it during their keynote speeches. That is understandable in Starmer’s case: the less immigration features in the political conversation the better from Labour’s point of view. But it confirms the impression given by Sunak in an interview with Paul Goodman of the ConservativeHome website back in April: he just doesn’t ‘get’ that huge swathes of the electorate are as concerned by massive regular immigration as they are by the need to ‘stop the boats’.

7. Ed Davey and his Lib Dems are effectively Starmerite Labour running under a different brand name. They have almost no significant differences with the red team’s leadership and are largely there to provide a reservoir of MPs to top up Labour support if it somehow fails to win a solid overall majority. Any Lib Dem gains at the expense of the Tories at the election next year will, in effect, amount to a ‘double bubble’ bonus for Starmer: one off the blue team, one more in his back pocket.
8. Suella Braverman was the stand-out star for the Tories, bravely re-iterating her ‘multiculturalism has failed’ message and having transformed herself from the fairly mousey figure of 2022 into a compelling communicator and potential party leader. The Home Secretary has a talent for creating advantageous dividing lines between the Tories and left-of-centre parties. The British left, both inside parliament and outside, is constantly triggered by her and the ensuing high-octane rows serve to cheer up traditionalist voters and lead them to think that perhaps there is a point in voting Conservative after all. Scenes of mass support for Hamas on the streets of British cities will have led millions of voters to think: ‘Suella is right.’

9. Kemi Badenoch grew further in authority. As bookies’ favourite to be the next party leader, she was the right-winger who didn’t need to turn the rhetorical volume up to eleven. Her biggest applause line – the one that got her the most media headlines too – was the declaration that Britain is the best country in the world in which to be black. In fact, she has used it in the Commons before. Being in charge of both the business brief (lovely new trade deals) and the equalities one (reining in the militant trans movement and hammering critical race theory zealots) gives her some good tunes to play and she has become a formidable lead violinist. She is still the one to beat when the leadership next falls vacant.
10. Labour still has lots of weaknesses: From Anneliese Dodds’ plan for a new Race Act to drive through equality of outcome, to Yvette Cooper’s obvious lack of credibility as someone who could control immigration. Starmer is also still not a master communicator and can walk into elephant traps. His interview with GB News in which he declared there was ‘no intention’ to rejoin the EU rather than flatly ruling it out is a case in point. Given that any such move could clearly only occur beyond Starmer’s career as a top-rank politician, why risk setting the Eurosceptic hare running once more? Nonetheless, after the last fortnight many more voters will think he has created an electable alternative to the Conservative party and feel at least a smidgen of gratitude for that.