Delegates to the Labour Party conference arrived in Liverpool with a familiar feeling: the tentative hope, almost the belief, that they might win the next election.
It should not be a familiar feeling. After all, the 2024 election will include first-time voters who were not even born last time Labour won. But it is. At Labour’s conferences in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2017 and 2018, a substantial chunk of the party’s supporters thought that they might be on the verge of power. Since then, following the catastrophic 2019 election, there has seemed little prospect of doing more than wondering whether the 2030s might be Labour’s decade.
When, from late 2019 onwards, Boris Johnson’s government was riding successive waves of public support (post-election benefit-of-the-doubt; post-Brexit relief; early-pandemic fear and solidarity; Sunak-handout-enthusiasm; vaccine gratitude; post-lockdown release) even the idea of a mid-term opposition poll lead felt far-fetched. If there was any debate at all about what would happen to Labour at the next election, it
