Labour’s big moment to show change confronts an unexpected test

Good morning from Liverpool. I have a theory that in any given week, most people only really notice one news story. I don’t have as much data to back this hunch up as I would like, other than the sadly discontinued “This Week’s Most Noticed” series from Populus Polls, now known as Yonder.

One reason why party conferences matter is that, broadly speaking, they give each of England’s major parties one week in which they aren’t competing with their rivals for attention. The Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey had a rare invite on to the BBC One sofa. Rishi Sunak had a whole week in which his party could set out its stall without having to contend with tricky ambushes or parliamentary tricks from the opposition.

And now Keir Starmer gets his turn — but this year, the story that is dominating the papers, the TV news, and indeed the news this morning as I wake up to Radio 3’s breakfast programme, is Hamas’s attack on Israel which began on Saturday.

Given the scale and repercussions of what is happening, it feels somewhat glib to talk about what the surprise assault on Israel — after which Benjamin Netanyahu formally declared war — means for Labour’s party conference. Nonetheless, this is a UK politics email so: some thoughts on Labour’s strategy.

A ‘long and difficult’ conflict

An inevitable part of conference season is that for at least one week, you will find yourself in the completely wrong place covering the completely wrong story. My first ever conference season started with the Liberal Democrats’ gathering in Glasgow: a conference in which I spent most of the time on the phone to Labour contacts about a doomed attempt to get rid of Ed Miliband.

At last year’s Labour party conference, also in Liverpool, the real story was the collapse of Liz Truss’s “mini” budget and the economic crisis facing the UK in general and LDIs, or liability driven investment strategies, in particular.

Today, the story that most people — even here at the conference — are talking about is the outbreak over the weekend of the worst Israeli-Palestinian conflict in years. The most important thing, of course, is the attack, its casualties and consequences.

On that topic, if you haven’t already, you really should read Neri Zilber and Mehul Srivastava’s harrowing account of the attack, James Shotter and Andrew England’s account of what it means for Israel’s intelligence services, Gideon Rachman’s lucid and compelling column, and Lawrence Freedman’s free Substack on the differences between the Yom Kippur war 50 years ago and today’s events.

But what happens in Israel matters for this conference too. The first consequence is that Labour’s annual gathering will go unnoticed by practically everyone outside the conference centre walls. Labour’s announcements are important of course, given that it is highly likely to form the next government (here’s George Parker and Rachel Millard on one of them). But in terms of shaping voter perceptions of the Labour party, everything shadow ministers announce this week will have to be repeated, because absolutely none of it is going to register with the British public now.

The second — and the only caveat to what I just wrote — is that if this conference registers at all, it will be that it is going to be covered and seen as a litmus test as to how much Keir Starmer really has changed the Labour party. How MPs and activists talk about the Israel-Palestinian conflict will be used to assess just how meaningful Starmer’s changes in the Labour party really are.

Starmer wanted this conference to be the third and final stage in his three-part plan of changing the Labour party, eroding the Conservative party lead and establishing why Labour is a better alternative. Events overseas now mean that this conference, if it is noticed at all, will instead be a stress test of how much that first step of changing the Labour party really meant anything at all.

Now try this

In a really happy set of events, two excellent Liverpool restaurants — Lunya and Maray — now have branches at the Albert Dock where Labour’s conference takes place. The Albert Dock branch of Lunya is called Lunyalita but there is no handy hint in the naming of the Maray’s Dockside branch, which led to some tense scenes when my dining party ended up in two different places. Still, it could be worse: the third branch of Maray is in Manchester.

Top stories today

• Electric feel | Labour would reinstate a 2030 ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars within months if it wins the next general election to restore “certainty” for the car industry, shadow business secretary Jonathan Reynolds said.

• Overtime plan | Keir Starmer set out his party’s plan to tackle the NHS crisis and reduce the acute backlog in appointment waiting times at Labour’s conference yesterday.

• No better off | University students from the UK’s least well-off families are still no more likely to go to the country’s top universities than when the Labour party launched a revolution in higher education 25 years ago, according to new research.

• ‘Bust’ | Jails in England and Wales are “bust” of space and may run out of places to house offenders this week, the leader of Britain’s prison governors has warned, the Telegraph’s Charles Hymas reports. Andrea Albutt, president of the Prison Governors’ Association, said there were only about 300 spaces left in men’s prisons as the number of inmates passed 88,000 on Friday, the highest figure since records began in 1900 and a rise of 10,000 in two years.