Keir Starmer to offer glimpse of what lies at end of tunnel

In his first Labour conference speech as prime minister, Keir Starmer will say there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The thrust of this conference has been that Labour want to unbrick the exit to the tunnel, or have concluded the light they can now see at the end of it isn’t an oncoming train.

In other words, they are trying to calibrate the sentiment this new government is giving off.

Plenty within the government have concluded that they have perhaps overdone the doom and gloom in the language they have been using, and so they have started to use words loaded with a bit of sunshine, but not too much.

Those around the prime minister say the “exam question” he wants to answer in his speech this afternoon is “what is the house on the hill we are heading for?”

To stretch the visual imagery, if the tunnel is eventually escaped from, what does the destination look like?

Sir Keir will try to sketch that out this afternoon.

A year ago here in Liverpool, the mood at Labour’s conference was effervescent, “there was energy, buzz and anticipation,” as one minister put it.

There was too, they acknowledged, a “huge sense of anxiety” about actually winning – but the sense of excitement was off the scale.

This year, the other side of a massive election win, yes there is celebration, but the weight and responsibilities of office sit heavily.

We shouldn’t be too surprised by that.

Such responsibilities are heavy and this is a party not used to carrying them. They are still adjusting to how to govern and how to make the machinery of government work.

The news we brought you last week about the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Sue Gray was arguably symptomatic of some of that.

The government also has a soon to be departing Cabinet secretary, the top civil servant in the country and a vital part of the government machine.

Simon Case will be gone within a few months, and a successor needs to be found.

And other appointments in Downing Street still need to be made.

Becoming prime minister not only involves working out which levers to pull to get things done, but also where those levers are.

“Keir doesn’t know what good looks like,” is how one figure put it to me.

While we know she has her internal detractors, supporters of Sue Gray say this is precisely what she is good at.

But other key appointments need sorting and quickly, others say, to get things properly going.

This government has barely been around long enough to properly audit what it is up to or where it is heading – we will be better placed to do that at next year’s conference.

But buffeted by the recent rows about staffing, freebies and cutting the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners, little wonder there will be a riff in Sir Keir’s about things the government has done already.

Then, there will be the forward looking stuff.

The focus will be domestic policy as he will save talk of foreign affairs for a speech at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Thursday.

He will want to sketch out the landscape for his first year and beyond in office.

To come, they have their new industrial strategy, the spending review for the next financial year and then, next spring, the spending review for the two years after that.

The next staging post beyond today is next month’s Budget.

There have been hints here ministers are toying with tweaking the various self imposed rules they set themselves to allow perhaps a bit more scope for longer term spending.

The Budget, as one minister put it, “will allow energy to come back into the room”.

Today will be about the prime minister attempting to articulate that.