How will Keir Starmer deal with hecklers during his big speech?

What does Keir Starmer have planned for his conference speech, due to begin shortly? Not so much the words in his script, but what he plans to say if – when – he’s heckled. 

Starmer has been taking quite a Neil Kinnock stance over the past few days, antagonising the hard left with his rule changes for leadership elections and refusal to back a £15-an-hour minimum wage. And you can’t channel Kinnock without expecting a few heckles in your conference speech.

LabourList‘s Sienna Rodgers reports that Momentum has instructed its delegates to heckle about the wage pledge, rather than sing ‘ohhh Jeremy Corbyn’. They believe that Starmer will have prepared a retort to heckles about the former leader but will find it much harder to give someone calling for higher wages a dressing down from the conference stage.

Those around the leader see this conference as being the last hurrah of the left, with Andy McDonald’s departure from the shadow cabinet being inconveniently timed but ultimately useful as it weakens the left’s reaches into the top echelons of the party. 

It’s a pretty noisy last hurrah, though. At fringes organised by Corbynite group The World Transformed last night, delegates cheered figures such as Nadia Whittome, Richard Burgon and Barry Gardiner, who urged them to stay and fight for the left (a phrase they heard many centrists using during the Corbyn era). Rebecca Long-Bailey told the tent that ‘there is no rule change that will stop us from standing up when you kick us down’. 

Andy McDonald passed on a message to the crowd, presumably because he was too busy not being a shadow minister to attend in person. He demanded that Starmer should seek a fresh mandate from the membership if he fails to honour the ten pledges he made during the leadership campaign. 

The left clearly see it is better to undermine Starmer by suggesting that he cannot be trusted to keep his word to the members he elected than it is to merely hark back to the Corbyn days. It is also easier for them to focus on policy than it is on an alternative leader to Starmer, because so many of them have different ideas about who that could possibly be.