Up on the screen over the Labour conference stage, the names of the constituencies the party now held scrolled away from us, like the opening crawl of a Star Wars film. Basingstoke. Bournemouth East. Bournemouth West. Bracknell. Buckingham and Bletchley. It is a dark time for the Conservative Party. 

Although if you were to listen to some of the chatter around Liverpool, you’d be tempted to think it was Labour that had lost the election. Tory politicians can be part of the worst government in living memory and still feel like they deserve victory, whereas Labour activists are conditioned for disaster. If there’s a bright centre of optimism to British politics, they’re on the planet that it’s farthest from.

All week Keir Starmer had faced suggestions from journalists and others that he needed to put some goodies into his address on Tuesday. He was having none of it, dismissing this early on as “bad faith advice from people who still hanker for the politics of noisy performance, the weak and cowardly fantasy of populism.” If you want cheering up, these aren’t the words you’re looking for.

Instead, unable to match the cheery optimism that comes so easily to some other politicians, Starmer offered a conscious rejection. Not as clumsy or random as a Boris Johnson effort, this was intended to be an elegant speech for a more civilized age. 

Whether it achieved that is another matter. The most-clipped moment came as the prime minister got to the section on the Middle East. While it’s unlikely that anyone over there was paying much attention to his words, there are people in Labour who seem convinced Starmer is personally responsible for the situation. As we walked into the conference centre, we passed a sign telling us the party was now controlled by Zionists. The only heckler to interrupt the prime minister was shouting about Gaza. Somehow, Corbynism returned. 

So this was a tense moment, every line precisely calibrated, which makes it all the more awkward that as Starmer set out his position, he told us he wanted: “an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the return of the sausages… the hostages.” It’s hard to guess what might have been behind the slip. Perhaps he’d skipped breakfast. In the hall, it was less noticeable, as the audience was already loudly clapping the ceasefire line, but it caused delight online, especially among Conservatives desperate for evidence that the government is falling apart. It’s their only hope.

Not that Starmer’s party is free of delusions. The story he told them was one of goodies and baddies, where for somewhere between 13 years and a thousand generations, Labour were the guardians of peace and justice in Britain. Before the dark times… before the Tories.

Everything terrible that had happened since was, in one way or another, evidence of the awfulness of the Conservatives. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

There were brief challenges to party shibboleths here and there: immigration should be controlled, the NHS reformed, benefit fraud cut. But they were hidden behind platitudes. “Racism is vile” got a standing ovation, but they’d clap that at a Reform conference. “If you bury your head because things are difficult, your country goes backwards,” he said, while avoiding mention of the really difficult subject of Brexit. In trade terms, Europe remains far, far away. 

The end was in sight, but first the prime minister wanted to tell us a long anecdote about taking his kids to visit the cottage where he used to holiday with his parents. Up in the press benches we sighed. No reward is worth this. 

Starmer’s message to his party was that he had ambitions to remake the country, but he wasn’t in a position to share the details. Did they doubt him? He found their lack of faith disturbing.

They got there in the end, rising to their feet to cheer as he reached his final paragraphs, having remembered that it was them, not the Dark Side, that had won the election. As he closed, Victoria Starmer rushed on stage to kiss her husband. Her words were inaudible to us, though we can guess. “You came here with that speech? You’re braver than I thought.”