Isabel Hardman

Wednesday morning at Labour conference is back to being the graveyard shift, with the delegates who are still there nursing hangovers and sharing videos of the speakers on the stage doing karaoke the night before. But this morning's session covered two of the most important public services from two of the party's rising stars – Wes Streeting and Bridget Phillipson. Streeting was in the gravest of the graveyard slots this morning Streeting is everywhere (including in the karaoke videos), and some of his colleagues are a bit irritated that he seems to have been anointed as the next Labour leader. Phillipson, though, is the one to watch because she unnerves the Conservatives and is applauded for being tough in her education brief.

Keir Starmer has spent the hours since his successful conference speech lapping up the praise from party members, frontbench colleagues and business. He had the air of a man who had hit his stride when he appeared in the broadcast studios this morning, ridiculing questions about whether he was a bit boring by saying ‘if I came on and said I’ve done a bungee jump, you wouldn’t say “oh great, now we’ve got the prime minister we need”.’ You could hear his eye-roll as he said ‘bungee jump’ into the Today programme microphone.

Keir Starmer’s big speech to his party’s conference was about the practical things Labour could do to fix Britain. He was introduced by the leader of Southampton Council, who talked repeatedly about what happens when Labour gets into power. She said that Starmer ‘knew what Labour had to do to win again… now he is setting out what Britain needs to do to win again.’ Starmer’s big announcement to show how Labour will help Britain win again was a practical one: a Labour government will set up Great British Energy, a publicly-owned energy company which will ‘take advantage of the opportunities in clean British power’.

Labour conference has been pretty strange so far. Not the sort of strange that parties in opposition get comfortably used to: eccentric stalls in the conference centre, frontbenchers sounding off about their own pet projects that directly contradict what the leader is up to, or fights between members on the conference floor (sometimes involving inflatable animals to get more attention). But strange because of the absence of those things, and a seriousness that has quite visibly changed the demeanour of most people in Liverpool. Yes, there are gripes from the conference floor about Keir Starmer not turning up to picket lines, but the membership is upbeat and largely supportive of the Labour leader.

Rachel Reeves's speech to Labour conference was very warmly received – though her thunder was rather stolen by the rapturous reception for Ed Miliband shortly before. The shadow chancellor made her refrain 'it is time for a government that is on your side, and that government is a Labour government'.  Like her other frontbench colleagues, she took care to be upbeat about the future, rather than merely focusing on how dreadful things are at the moment. She talked about the potential that British workers had, saying: 'The world is changing fast but the British capacity for enterprise for innovation and for hard work remains undimmed.' She claimed that a Labour government would oversee 'cranes going up, shovels in the ground, the sounds and sights of the future arriving'.

The mood at Labour conference so far has been pretty upbeat. Last night on the fringes, frontbenchers were visibly happier and more relaxed than they’ve been for years, feeling emboldened to criticise left-wing groups such as Momentum (Wes Streeting told one meeting they’d be better named ‘Inertia’). The broadcast screens around the centre underline why the party is feeling confident: the fall of the pound is just, in Labour’s view, the latest sign that the wheels have come off the Conservative party. The fall of the pound is just, in Labour’s view, the latest sign that the wheels have come off the Conservative party That’s not to say that everyone is delighted with the way the leadership is approaching the big issues of the autumn.