Who are the winners and losers from the Conservative and Labour conferences?

This year has certainly been an eventful conference season, as Sean O’Grady considers the winners and losers

This year’s conferences were no more exciting than usual in spite of being billed, as ever, as ‘make or break’ (AFP via Getty)

Although everyone involved takes them so seriously, and every party conference is supposed to be “make or break”, they never get the billing “You can safely ignore this one, it’s ages before the election”, truly momentous conference “moments” are rare. Labour usually dishes up most of these because, apart from during the New Labour years, conference is supposed to be sovereign, and so various rows about Europe, nuclear weapons and how to elect the leader tend to grab the headlines.

Sometimes a party leader will coin a phrase or declare war on some faction or other, as when Hugh Gaitskell pledged to fight unilateral nuclear disarmament, and when Margaret Thatcher told her audience, “You turn if you want to... The lady’s not for turning.”

There were no such thrills this time around, and the leaders’ speeches were either dull and policy-driven (Starmer) or entertaining but content-free (Johnson); but that doesn’t mean the proceedings were entirely meaningless or devoid of interest. There were some notable winners and losers, and pointers to the future…