Keir Starmer to offer glimpse of what lies at end of tunnel

In his first Labour conference speech as prime minister, Keir Starmer will say there is light at the end of the tunnel.

The thrust of this conference has been that Labour want to unbrick the exit to the tunnel, or have concluded the light they can now see at the end of it isn’t an oncoming train.

In other words, they are trying to calibrate the sentiment this new government is giving off.

Plenty within the government have concluded that they have perhaps overdone the doom and gloom in the language they have been using, and so they have started to use words loaded with a bit of sunshine, but not too much.

Those around the prime minister say the “exam question” he wants to answer in his speech this afternoon is “what is the house on the hill we are heading for?”

To stretch the visual imagery, if the tunnel is eventually escaped from, what does the destination look like?

Sir Keir will try to sketch that out this afternoon.

A year ago here in Liverpool, the mood at Labour’s conference was effervescent, “there was energy, buzz and anticipation,” as one minister put it.

There was too, they acknowledged, a “huge sense of anxiety” about actually winning – but the sense of excitement was off the scale.

This year, the other side of a massive election win, yes there is celebration, but the weight and responsibilities of office sit heavily.

We shouldn’t be too surprised by that.

Such responsibilities are heavy and this is a party not used to carrying them. They are still adjusting to how to govern and how to make the machinery of government work.

The news we brought you last week about the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff Sue Gray was arguably symptomatic of some of that.

The government also has a soon to be departing Cabinet secretary, the top civil servant in the country and a vital part of the government machine.