Portrait of the week: Starmer’s sausages slip-up, Israel’s strikes on Lebanon and Amazon staff summoned back to office

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Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, in his speech to the Labour party conference in Liverpool, said that ‘if we take tough long-term decisions now’ Britain would much more quickly reach the ‘light at the end of this tunnel’. He was cheered when he promised to return the railways to public ownership and restore workplace rights to unions and workers. But he insisted that ‘if we want cheaper electricity, we need new pylons over ground otherwise the burden on taxpayers is too much’. He recovered from a fluff when, talking of Gaza, he called ‘for the return of the sausages – the hostages’.

Sir Keir hoped to counteract recent difficulties. He had earlier asserted that he was ‘completely in control’ during a row among government advisers about Sue Gray, the chief of staff at Downing Street, and her salary of £170,000 (more than the Prime Minister’s), a sum leaked to the BBC. She did not attend the Labour conference. Government economic gloom and a warning that the Budget in October would be ‘painful’ were blamed for a fall in consumer confidence; GfK’s long-standing Consumer Confidence Barometer tumbled. There remained in the air the government’s decision not to pay many pensioners a winter fuel allowance. Most embarrassing was Sir Keir’s need to announce that he would no longer accept donations to pay for his clothes, and nor would Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, or Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He had declared more than £18,000 for clothes and spectacles from Lord Alli, a Labour peer, but they had declared thousands of pounds in work clothing to be general office support. Asked about hospitality tickets to Arsenal matches worth well over £10,000 since December 2019, he said: ‘I can’t go into the stands because of security reasons.’ Among gifts for Lady Starmer were tickets to see Taylor Swift twice this summer.