Careful, Keir: things can only get better... until you’re in office

It is hard to see what could have gone more right for Keir Starmer. By a quirk of bookings, the Labour conference has gone the week after the Conservatives instead of its usual slot the week before.

The prime minister obliged by managing his conference so badly that it was dominated by the decision to cut the high-speed rail link to the venue. The main excitement on the fringes of the Tory conference was generated by Liz Truss, a leader so disastrous that she set a new record for brevity of prime ministerial tenure, and Nigel Farage, the bane of the party for so long.

The scene thus set, Labour managed to avoid its historic destiny of making a mess of things. Although the tech broke down, which meant that the surprise video of Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, endorsing Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, had to be shown after her speech, rather than before. But not even that glitch could detract from the thrill of the coup.

This was the central banker whom George Osborne pursued around the world to persuade him to take the job at the Bank and lend his credibility to the coalition government’s attempt to cut the deficit. It was a great coup for Osborne to secure his services; it is an equally good moment for Reeves to bring him over to the other side.

Reeves’s speech was the best to a Labour conference since Gordon Brown’s thundering addresses, and had a strikingly Brownian refrain: “Ready to serve, ready to lead, ready to rebuild Britain.”

And the comparison with Brown draws attention to one big difference between today and the New Labour era. Not only are Starmer and Reeves as dominant today as Tony Blair and Brown were 26 years ago, both in the Labour Party and across the political landscape, but they get on with each other.

The fashionable historical view is that the tension between Blair and Brown was creative, and led to better policymaking and a more stress-tested strategy. This is, of course, bunkum, and Labour is in a better position now that the leader and shadow chancellor actually seem to quite like each other. Not that this guarantees the policies are any good, of course, but it does make it easier to get them right.

The success of Reeves’s speech, nevertheless, poses a problem for Starmer today. Not just the danger of his own speech being outshone; and not just the irritation of commentators acclaiming Reeves as his obvious successor, should a successor be needed in the foreseeable future. But it is better to have the problems of success than the Tories’ problems, of division, unpopularity and exhaustion.

The Labour leader has to try to restrain the assumption of victory at the election, which is still, probably, a year away. The Liverpool conference centre is awash with CEOs and lobbyists, who are all there because they expect a Labour government. Last night, it was impossible to find a table in any restaurant in the city centre, not even at Pizza Hut.

Starmer has tried to talk down these dangerous expectations. His pre-speech comments to the Daily Mirror were of the need for a “decade of national renewal”. It was an attempt to dial down the hubris that only looked like more hubris. It sounded to some as if Starmer was taking the voters for granted, expecting to win not just this election but the next.

The last time we heard of someone looking forward to 10 years in power it was Boris Johnson. He secured a front-page headline in The Times about a “decade in Downing Street” not once but twice, as he tried to give the impression that he was thinking about a longer planning horizon than the middle of the following week.

Starmer was trying to do something quite different. He was trying to lower expectations of what a Labour government could achieve, making the point that it will take a long time to reverse the damage the Conservatives have done.

But again, these are the problems of success. Trying to manage the expectations of party activists who think it is Christmas Eve can be tricky. As is dealing with voters who might be expecting higher economic growth “within months” of a Labour government, as Starmer foolishly allowed himself to be pushed into promising in a TV interview on Sunday.

Starmer and Reeves should relish the moment because things will probably not seem so promising for Labour for another 26 years or so. And tell themselves that it is better to be dealing with the problems of success than those of failure.