“I’m a Labour student who enjoyed the disco a bit too much last night.” Finally, Labour conference had found someone who spoke for the entire hall. Wednesday morning had a distinct air of the morning after the night before: the feeling of fragile heads and delicate stomachs, of enhanced sensitivity to one’s surroundings somehow combined with numbness in the limbs.

Nothing slows Streeting down, certainly not lack of sleep

The previous evening the hotel bars had been full, the Mirror newspaper’s karaoke party jammed with actual Cabinet ministers. If people hadn’t been drinking before Emily Thornberry and Anas Sarwar’s dance-off, they were afterwards. Now dawn had come, and they were paying for it. The sensation of still wearing yesterday’s clothes was only enhanced by the way the conference was being rapidly disassembled around us. The prime minister was in New York, and many of the delegates had already taken trains home. Nothing said The Party’s Over like the words of the lady serving in the conference hall café: “It’s instant. Black or white?”

At moments like this, experienced over-indulgers reach for Berocca, the fizzy energy tablets that, if they don’t quite restore you to normal, at least get you out of the door. Labour has its own orange effervescent pick-me-up, in the form of the tanned, perky Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.

He had last been spotted heading for the Mirror bash late in the evening, but nothing slows Streeting down, certainly not lack of sleep. He is immune to the effects of aging, his face as smooth at age 41 as it was at 16. Perhaps he is a robot from the future, come to party all night and wind-up left-wingers. He did his best to stir the hall, offering provocation with a story of a life saved by private healthcare, and promising the same to everyone else, paid for by the state. “Because working people deserve to be treated on time just as much as the wealthy.”  But if he was hoping for a furious confrontation with a heckler, he was disappointed. The hall was too knackered for all that, at least at that point in the morning.

Liz Kendall was a warm chocolate croissant

The next Cabinet minister we heard from was Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, who was introduced by one of her former teachers. As hangover cures go, she was strong black coffee, a powerful speaker who felt no need to sweeten her message with jokes. Phillipson isn’t one of the Cabinet’s best-known faces, but she’s one to watch, with an ability to hold an even audience as tired as this. “Life should not come down to luck,” she said, before repeating her party’s promise to “end private school tax breaks,” a pledge that finally stirred the hall to whoop with delight. They are looking forward to winning the coming battle on the paying fields of Eton.

After that, Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall was a warm chocolate croissant, promising to fight child poverty, and trying to reassure those who saw her as driving the pensioner version with the plan to cut the Winter Fuel Payment. “We had to act,” she said. It had been “a very difficult decision.”

She was followed by the Unite union’s Sharon Graham, who offered an off-menu pick-me-up, denouncing the winter fuel cut. The government was hurting the elderly, she said, and “leaving the super-rich untouched.” The government’s fiscal rules “are self-imposed and the decision to keep them is hanging a noose around out necks,” she went on, before finishing, fist in the air, with a declaration that “the system is rigged”. By now, people were becoming energised.

Next up was Alan Tate of the CWU, echoing his union colleague. Instead of punishing pensioners, he said, ministers ought to be “picking up the phone for the tech giants like Amazon and the ultra wealthy and making them pay their fair share of tax.” His faith in the power of a telephone call was touching, but perhaps it’s understandable in someone who represents communication workers.

All this was greeted with enthusiastic applause, but only here and there in the room did people stand in support. It was striking that there was much more warmth in the hall for the two people who spoke in favour of backing the government over the cut. Perhaps, we thought, ministers would actually win the coming vote on the policy.

This had been scheduled as essentially the final act of the conference, with the goal of ensuring that it went as unnoticed as possible. Lynne Morris, the official chairing the session, asked for hands in the air. Most of these votes have been overwhelmingly in favour of whatever the party leadership wanted, but here there was a genuine split.

From the back where the press sat, it seemed that Sharon Graham had lost, with clearly more hands against her than for — there were shouts of “shame on you” at this point — but we had forgotten that at Labour conference, some hands are more equal than others. Union leaders were sat in an area that was out of our sightline, and there the vote had gone the other way. “That was carried,” Morris said, ignoring shouts for a card vote. “The advice I have been given is that it was carried on the basis of the rules of the party.”

It is a meaningless victory, of course, but the Labour left has always been happy with those. Ministers will carry on running the country as they choose, and their internal opponents will get to feel that they’ve won the argument. Perhaps it’s a little hard to digest, but that’s only to be expected after a heavy night.