How Keir Starmer Could Still Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory

The Labour leader's reluctance to define himself, or his party, is allowing his opponents to do it for him

I have attended party conferences for around ten years now and have never previously experienced anything quite like the one I experienced in Manchester last week.

At both fringe events and on the conference hall platform itself, Conservative ministers and MPs parroted far-right talking points and conspiracy theories, barracked journalists, and spread outright lies.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister spent his entire week claiming to be a “straight talker” while lying about the fact that he had already made a decision on scrapping HS2 to Manchester.

And while polls now put the party as much as 21 points behind Labour, the two biggest stars at their conference were a politician who just one year ago led them to their lowest poll ratings of modern times, and Nigel Farage.

If Conservative MPs had been looking for signs that their party is a modernising force that is capable of winning its fifth consecutive term in office, then they will have struggled to find any at their gathering last week.

Yet as I head to Labour’s own conference in Liverpool, there are still reasons to be wary about confident predictions of a landslide victory for Labour under Keir Starmer.

So how could it all still go horribly wrong?