Keir Starmer has presented voters with a serious alternative to the Tories

Sir Keir Starmer likes to say – “boast” is hardly the word – that his main achievement at this stage of his leadership is that the British people, having stopped listening to Labour for a while, are now at least inclined to give him a hearing.

It’s certainly true, on the basis of the result of the general election in December 2019, that Labour’s message didn’t at that point resonate with the electorate, and it’s a sign of the internal challenges still facing Starmer that he felt compelled to remind his party conference of this salient fact.

Evidently, Starmer is making some progress with the electorate, and he and his team are starting to frame some narratives and come up with what Tony Blair called “eye-catching initiatives”. A good deal of that is down to the two most senior women on the front bench – Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves – who have both had a good conference.

Workers’ rights from day one of employment, abolition of business rates, and the end of charitable status for fee-paying schools are precisely the kind of high-profile moves that the public is prepared to at least consider on their merits.

When Starmer pledged in his speech that he would present the British people with a serious plan for government, it was not merely a renunciation of Jeremy Corbyn, but precisely the approach the party needs to take to encourage the public to vote for Labour.

Sadly, Starmer wasn’t getting much of a hearing from some of his own “supporters” in the conference hall. He was heckled virtually non-stop during his oration, even at moments when he talked in solemn terms about his family. There was no consistent theme to what may have been an organised attempt at disruption.

One protester asked loudly where Peter Mandelson was, almost as if they wanted to send him a seaside postcard. Tony Blair once remarked that the Labour Party could be said to have been reformed as New Labour once it learned to love Mr (now Lord) Mandelson. He was expressing a knowingly vain hope about the nature of the party’s activist base.

More commonly, the chants were for the £15 minimum wage that Starmer and his shadow chancellor think would be too high. Right or wrong, the impression given by the interruptions and obsessions of the awkward squad in the Brighton conference centre is that, while Starmer might be sensible, patriotic, and slightly less boring than they’d assumed, his party is still jam-packed with extreme views.

The point – implicitly acknowledged in the rule changes engineered by the leadership at the start of the conference – is that potential Labour voters will be badly deterred if they think the party, and thus a Labour government, could fall into the hands of the hard left – a humane, dedicated and sincere collection of socialists though it may comprise.

There are legitimate doubts about a party that, less than two years ago, presented the electorate with a manifesto that was ridiculed for its promise of free broadband for all, among other extravagant promises. Labour will fail again if it thinks that, for example, raising living standards can be secured simply by passing laws that set a higher and higher minimum wage. There seems to be a kind of perverse auction going on in the Labour Party, whereby proof of socialist zeal is provided by bidding up the level of the minimum wage.

In fact, significant sections of the British public, who did after all vote for an Old Etonian charlatan with a track record of racist and homophobic remarks, think Starmer, Reeves and Rayner are a gang of dangerously “woke” lefties with a secret agenda to get the UK back into the EU.

No matter how poor a premier they think Johnson is, such voters are still suspicious of the alternative. The current leadership is, to be clear, still some way to the left of Mr Blair, the last person to win a general election for the Labour Party. Where – other, more sympathetic voters will wonder – is the guarantee that the party will not fall into the hands of the heirs of Corbyn, once it is back in government?

Remarkably, over the three-quarters of a century since the end of the Second World War, Labour has succeeded in ejecting the Conservatives from power and replacing them on only four occasions, although Corbyn almost did it in 2017, arguably because no one thought he would win, and because Theresa May was such a disastrously poor performer.

Such turning points leftwards are, in any case, very rare events. No one should underestimate just how difficult a job putting a progressive party into power in Britain has been, historically, and it’s been as much about Tory exhaustion in office as what Labour has had to offer. Johnson’s populism now presents a powerful new spin on the old tradition of working-class Toryism, although his carelessness and incompetence – his “triviality”, as Starmer calls it – does offer an opening for the opposition.

The last few days have shown that Starmer and most of his party do comprehend the magnitude of the task ahead, but there is plenty of evidence too that, in Starmer’s words, others in his ranks still much prefer shouting slogans to changing lives.