Labour Party Conference in Liverpool Highlights Leadership Shift and Policy Debates

LIVERPOOL, England — A parade of top politicians from the governing Labour Party headed through the doors of the POLITICO Pub during the party’s annual conference in Liverpool Monday — with plenty more to come.

Labour is in a chipper mood after swapping out unpopular leader Keir Starmer for the telegenic, hopey-changey Andy Burnham. But there’s a hard road ahead: a high-stakes budget arrives in exactly a month, and Nigel Farage’s right-populist outfit Reform UK remains just two points behind Labour in the national opinion polls, according to our aggregator.

Here are the snap takeaways from a flurry of frank conversations down the (travelling) POLITICO local.

1) Andy Burnham has some wind in his sails

Britain’s new PM goes into his big conference speech Tuesday with at least one reason to feel cheerful: he seems to have dramatically shifted the British public’s view of politics itself.

A majority of Brits say they believe his Labour Party has a real chance of winning the next election, whenever it comes. That’s the verdict of a new POLITICO Poll from Public First, unveiled at the pub Monday, and which captures the state of play after Burnham’s first two months as prime minister.

It found 53% of voters believe Labour has a realistic shot at keeping power. That is a big increase from 33% in May — when Starmer was in the final stages of his doomed premiership.

That was reflected in a bullish pub take from Lucy Powell, the Labour Party’s deputy leader. She told POLITICO she expects Labour to keep hold of the Holborn and St. Pancras seat at the upcoming parliamentary by-election triggered by Starmer’s exit from the political scene.

Caveat alert: Powell felt pretty chirpy about the Gorton and Denton by-election – where the party under Starmer lost to the Greens — too. So bookmark this one.

2) Gordon Brown just can’t stop giving advice

In the latest sign Labour can’t quite get over its 1990s heyday, two more Cabinet ministers revealed that former PM Gordon Brown is in regular contact with them.

After Chancellor John Healey shed light on his own advice from Brown over the weekend, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told the POLITICO Pub he and Brown’s most recent interaction was a phone chat while Miliband was in New York at the U.N. General Assembly. “I had a late-night phone call with him actually last week,” Miliband said. “They come thick and fast.”

Scotland Secretary Douglas Alexander told us he felt like consoling Healey about Brown’s stream of ALL-CAPS messages by telling him “the first 35 years is the worst and then you get over it.”

3) We’re starting to tease out how Labour’s big beasts really see the world

Burnham’s ascent to the top of Labour saw a big changing of the guard in the U.K. cabinet.

Previously domestic-focused ministers Ed Miliband and Wes Streeting – both from rival schools in the Labour movement — are now turning their attention to the world outside Westminster and getting pinned down on the specifics.

In back-to-back POLITICO Pub interviews, Miliband — a Labour veteran who is now the U.K.’s foreign secretary — signalled a split with the Trump administration on the U.S. president’s bid to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin to the G20 in Miami. And he risked disappointing some of his supporters on Labour’s soft-left by batting away suggestions the U.K. should stump up reparations to Commonwealth nations for its role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Streeting, for his turn, came over a little Mark Rutte. In a line that could have been uttered by the NATO chief, who has stressed the need to give Trump a hearing on European defense spending, Streeting warned Britain and Europe to get out of their “defensive crouch.”

4) Labour can’t quite shake the election questions

Burnham may have gone into conference ruling out a snap election, but that hasn’t stopped the swirling speculation about how exactly the PM would cobble together a government if he falls short of a majority when voters do eventually go to the polls.

Stephen Kinnock, the Welsh secretary, at least told the POLITICO Pub he cannot see Labour working with Plaid Cymru — which stormed to power in devolved elections earlier this year.

Kinnock said: “If the condition for that coalition to work is that you would then agree to nationalism and separatism and the breakup of the United Kingdom, the answer is no.”

5) Shopping in London is about to get less awful

London Mayor Sadiq Khan came armed with a newsline for his POLITICO Pub grilling. Khan, a three-time election-winning Labour stalwart who has often beefed with Donald Trump, revealed that a kilometer of London’s iconic Oxford Street will be pedestrianized next month.

Just in time for the Christmas shopping chaos.