QUENTIN LETTS: Labour’s cries about Tory corruption worked better before the Lord Alli scandal

This Labour conference should have been a victory parade, Emperor Starmer’s Merseyside durbar. Instead, people are tiptoeing around the vast venue, eyes glued to the ground, wearing slightly carsick faces. The only people smiling are at the euthanasia trade stand, but I give them a swerve.

When Sir Keir arrived with Angela Rayner – she of the free Manhattan apartment – ​​they were greeted by a group of young people doing their best to cheer. Then a reporter, her voice cutting through the fog, shouted from behind: ‘Should you have taken those freebies, Prime Minister?’ Shoulders slumped.

Letting someone else buy your trousers: it’s all a bit Timothy Lumsden, really. Tasteless and dependent. As the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg put it in a heated morning TV duel with Ms Rayner: ‘Why do politicians get free stuff?’ Big Angela, pale as shit, claimed she was working class and therefore ‘had to accept donations’.

Her holiday in New York was with a boyfriend who was a Labour MP at the time. Mrs Rayner called him ‘the other person’.

Sir Keir Starmer (left) and Angela Rayner (right) at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool on September 22, 2024

When questioned about Lord Alli’s freebies, Ms Rayner (pictured) said she was working class and ‘had to accept donations’

Had she really been transparent? “I broke the rules,” she replied with unintended honesty. She tried three times to reject the “caricature” of profit-seeking politicians.

Her false teeth were unfortunately not in the mood to cooperate and it came out as ‘cariktachore’, ‘carrotachewer’ and ‘carackt-achoo’. Miss Kuenssberg: ‘Bless you.’

Our new Deputy Prime Minister, together with her colleagues from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economic Affairs, has shown her complete generosity and announced: ‘I am becoming collegial’.

Sue Gray (lucky one) isn’t there.

Can she survive? “I think so,” Angela said. Grumpy Sue will remember that and file it under T for treason.

The exhibition hall is bigger than the Autumn Show in Malvern. Instead of ericaceous compost, garden boxes and trowels, the stands here sell connections, business cards and ‘must do lunches’.

You can choose from PR agencies run by Blairites, trade unions, the Cuba Solidarity campaign, anti-monarchists, rewilders, cycling fanatics and filthy airports. In the midst of all these horrors, rather sweetly, is the British Toy and Hobby Association.

The conference began with a moving silence for the little girls murdered in Southport, before hearing from Ellie Reeves, also known as Lady Cryer because her ex-Labour MP husband has been promoted to the House of Lords.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner (left) and Prime Minister Sir Keir (right) arrived at the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool. Supporters cheered before a journalist raised the freebies scandal

Mrs Rayner delivers a speech at the Labour Party conference

Chief of Staff Sue Gray (pictured) is not attending the conference in Liverpool

The Deputy Prime Minister was overcome with emotion during her speech

Ellie Reeves speaks on the first full day of the Labour Party Conference

Ellie Reeves (left) and Chancellor Rachel Reeves (right) are indeed sisters

Her ladyship is the party’s leader and the slightly less strange sister of Rachel Reeves, and she accused the Tories of ‘destroying people’s faith in democracy’.

That might have worked better for all those stories about Lord Alli. Like other pre-cooked attack lines, it felt a little ripe now.

A video described the Sunak regime as “a government in moral decline” and mentioned Boris Johnson’s birthday party.

Well, okay. But now that we know Lord Alli paid for a birthday party for that thigh-slapper Bridget Phillipson (who curled her lip in a Sky News interview), the sordid business is backfiring.

The conference agenda committee, a notoriously hard-core body, is chaired this year by a green-robed lout named Lynne.

She struggled to read her speech. “Deputies must treat everyone with kindness and respect,” she grumbled.

A delegate, Dora Polenta, jumped up to complain about this or that.

She had such a thick Spanish accent, it was incomprehensible. Worse than Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

Lynne was invited to respond and won my new respect by pretending to understand Comrade Polenta’s babble.

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson felt uncomfortable today as she defended taking £14,000 from a Labour millionaire to organise ‘work events’

Ms Phillipson was this morning questioned about her own acceptance of donations from Lord Waheed Alli (pictured)

Foreign Secretary David Lammy gestures during his speech at the Labour Party Conference

Mrs Rayner gave a podium speech. It was a restrained speech for her, but she was more popular with the delegates than David Lammy, who spoke after lunch to a room that was far from full.

He danced around on the podium, shrugging his shoulders and pumping his fists as he spoke enthusiastically about Net Zero and international aid.

He kept saying ‘Britain is back’ – ten times or more – and claimed that the government would end global poverty. The audience continued to be slimy.

It can only get better.