OK, UK, you’ve had your fun – now Dad’s here to drive you home

The (Tory) party’s over, Keir Starmer appeared to be saying in his conference speech – so wipe that glitter off your shoulder, put your seatbelt on and let me drive you (at a very sensible 20mph) into a chaos-free Labour future, writes Tom Peck

Was the glittering of Keir Starmer the work of some kind of climate activist – or a bit of ambush marketing for hobbycraft? (PA)

Bass drum beats shook the room. Two thousand people whooped and cheered. A giant screen, at least 100ft-wide, cut between shots of the stage lights and those stirring over-the-shoulder pictures of the hero, walking with solemn purpose. It was an entrance in full World Wrestling Entertainment style.

And then, over the sound of rockstar thunder, out strode, at long last, Britain’s appropriate boyfriend.

He was here to say: come on – you’ve made your mistakes, you’ve had your fun, you’ve got your wild stories, your oven-ready deals and your £350m a week for the NHS. No one can take them away from you. But now it’s time to get real. Time to settle down.

They’d done their best to lay down upon him the sound and fury of a heavyweight boxer. But they couldn’t do much about his determination, in this carefully choreographed moment, to look not quite like the heavyweight champion of the world but an embarrassed tourist asking for directions.

And then, before he’d had a chance to clear his throat and enter into the most important moment of his life thus far, Keir Starmer was covered in glitter.

If he hadn’t been the latest in a very long line of people to be covered in glitter, no one in the room would have known what it was about. Even now, an hour and a half later, I am proceeding on the assumption that it was the work of some kind of climate activist and not a bit of ambush marketing for Hobbycraft. A young man shouted some things that no one heard and then was led away.

An aide appeared. The Labour leader looked like he knew it would be suboptimal if people watching later on the Six O’Clock News would wonder why it was that he’d just walked off the set of Strictly Come Dancing. The jacket was taken away, but underneath, the sleeves of his shirt appeared to have been pre-rolled. Was the jacket coming off regardless? We can never know.

Who can say – but what can be said is that the crowd went bananas. They showed no sign of having been fatigued by the hour-and-a-half queue to get in.

In the end, the appropriate boyfriend was not quite as appropriate as expected. He was, at times, furious. The polls suggest the public have made their mind up. That they’ve had enough of the chaos, the bacchanalia. They’ve woken up on a Thai beach covered in neon body paint with no idea how they got there – or, indeed, what they’ve been doing for the last seven years – and that now, at last, it’s time to come down. Time to go home. Time to call Dad.

But Dad wasn’t going to let the moment pass without a proper bollocking. For those of us – myself included – who have maybe spent the last five years wondering how it is that a man who looks like he’d struggle to force a five-year-old to go to bed was, actually, once the nation’s top criminal prosecutor, well, this speech was our answer.

The poise of it, the precision. There are not many politicians around with the charisma to make glitter invisible and, frankly, I didn’t think that Keir Starmer was one of them. But, three minutes into the speech of his life, it was still all there, in his hair, down his shirt front and around his shoulders. But everyone in the room had been compelled to look beyond it.

There weren’t many, you know, actual policies, but that didn’t matter. It won’t matter. There were just relentless promises to get Britain working again, to rebuild the NHS, to return dignity and security to work. There was the assertion, repeated over and over again, that Labour is on the side of working people and the Tories are not. There was clever rhetoric, clever oratory, that dovetailed this one, simple argument into everything, from illegal parties in Downing Street, to cancelling HS2 and giving up on the green energy revolution.

He knows very well that in the coming year, there will be a concerted effort to portray him and his party as members of some kind of liberal metropolitan elite, people who hold what Suella Braverman called “luxury beliefs”, of having the privilege of holding left-wing views because their comfortable lives are not at risk from mass immigration, or the costs of net zero.

But on this evidence, he’s just smarter than they are, just better at all this. Rishi Sunak thinks it wise to wheel out his wife to say he has always believed in “aspiration”, as some kind of honourable narrative that explains why he gets to spend his hedge fund millions on a 15-grand lunch for his children at Disneyland.

Starmer, meanwhile, is more interested in the story of his sister, a care worker who worked 14-hour nightshifts during the pandemic, while the people in Downing Street didn’t care about breaking the rules they’d made for other people to follow.

He can, with glitter in his hair, look around a room of a thousand people and say the following: “I grew up working class. I’ve been fighting all my life and I won’t stop now. And until your family can see the way out, I will fight for you.”

I’ve spent eight years listening to politicians’ speeches. The sensation of the hairs on the back of my neck standing up is one I honestly don’t think I have felt in all that time. In the members’ seats, there were people not so much welling up as openly weeping.

Barring a miracle, Britain has already decided on its future. It’s crying out for the simple life.

On Monday, its candidate for Crewe and Nantwich stood on the conference stage and said that Britain’s vision for the future should be “having a nice time, a meal out with friends”. The sort of thing that, frankly, should not have become impossible.

So what, frankly, are you waiting for? Robert De Niro might not be waiting, but the Kia Niro is. The driver’s in his best Sunday denim. Pizza Express is booked, he’s got his Tastecard in his top pocket, and the greatest hits of Lighthouse Family cued up on Spotify. All you’ve got to do is step in, close the door, fasten your seat belt, ride and cruise to your bright new tomorrow at a respectable 20 miles an hour.

For a country waiting around for a knight in shining armour, there are less subtle celestial signals than the knight in shining glitter. Sometimes, some things are just meant to be.