Prime minister answers his critics in conference speech but the real challenges still lie ahead
When Keir Starmer sat in the chair for his broadcast interview at the start of the Labour conference on Sunday, he already had a clear idea of what he wanted to pull off during the four-day political gathering in Liverpool.
With the historic Liver Building behind him, he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “At the end of it people can agree or disagree, but they can’t say they don’t know what we stand for, what this government is trying to achieve.”
While many will, fairly, say it is an indictment of the prime minister that, after more than a year in office, he still struggles to articulate his vision, his conference speech on Wednesday will have gone some way towards doing so.
A constant frustration of Starmer’s MPs has been that he does not like, as his allies put it, the “V” word. He is a details-focused pragmatist who takes decisions based on their merits, rather than whether they fit into any particular political story.
