DAN HODGES: We all at the moment are residing in Starmer’s Animal Farm…

At the start of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Napoleon, the self-styled ruler of the recently emancipated group of creatures, outlines his governance philosophy.

‘Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure,’ he explains. ‘On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?’

Keir Starmer wasn’t quite as self-serving in his conference speech on Tuesday. But there was a passage where he dismissed the criticism he and his government have been receiving with a similarly Orwellian flourish.

‘It is our duty to the British people to face up to necessary decisions in their interest,’ he intoned. ‘I mean, you know me by now. So you know all those shouts and bellows, the bad faith advice from people who still hanker for the politics of noisy performance, the weak and cowardly fantasy of populism. It’s water off a duck’s back.’

Keir Starmer has dismissed the criticism he and his new government have been receiving

Keir Starmer with his wife, Victoria, after delivering his first speech as Prime Minister to the Labour Party conference

The slogan for Labour’s week in Liverpool was ‘Change Begins’. But the actual tone of the conference was set on Sunday, when Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was sent out to try to explain why she and her colleagues had taken hundreds of thousands of pounds of hospitality in the form of flats, suits, dresses and parties from millionaire donor Lord Alli, who had then been issued with an access-all-areas pass to Downing Street.

‘All MPs do it,’ she claimed dismissively, ‘gifts and donations have been a factor in our political life for some time’.

To be fair, that did represent a change of sorts. Because up until the election, Rayner, Starmer and co. had a very different attitude towards fat-cats and cronyism.

‘When working people want something nice, the Tories tell us to work harder and save for it,’ she raged in December 2021. ‘When the Prime Minister wants designer wallpaper in his Downing Street flat, he texts his multimillionaire mate for the cash.’

But that was before the Starmer revolution swept the evil Tories from the farmyard. Now, if Angela Rayner wants something nice – such as a holiday to New York – she just texts her own multimillionaire mate Lord Alli.

The PM made no reference to the fact that Lord Alli, pictured, had been providing him with everything from new pairs of glasses to a flat in which his son could do his GCSE revision

Yet somehow she doesn’t see the hypocrisy at play here. And nor does her leader.

With the row over Lord Alli’s donations swirling around him, Starmer’s first major conference speech since becoming Prime Minister was the perfect opportunity to display the candour and transparency he once pledged would underpin his premiership. But he bottled it. We had the standard anecdote about a holiday in the Lake District. And a bizarre slip of the tongue where he called on Hamas to release the ‘sausages’.

But on the fact that Lord Alli had been providing him with everything from new pairs of glasses to a flat in which his son could do his GCSE revision, there wasn’t so much as a word. Nor was there any explanation of why the loan of the flat had been mysteriously extended well beyond the end of the exam season. Or why it had been used by the then Leader of the Opposition to film a political broadcast in December 2021, when Omicron was sweeping Britain and he and the rest of the country were supposed to be ‘working from home’.

And again, this reticence wasn’t on display at the start of the year, when Sir Keir opted to place a commitment to cleaning up politics and eradicating sleaze at the heart of his New Year’s message.

‘It’s not a game. Politics isn’t a hobby, a pastime for people who enjoy the feeling of power, and nor is it a sermon from on high, a self-regarding lecture, vanity dressed up as virtue,’ he lectured, before promising ‘a total crackdown on cronyism’. I once thought Starmer’s self-righteousness was an act. A political construct deployed by him and his advisers to exploit the Tory Party’s weakness for a bung and a freebie. But it really isn’t. Watching him speak on Tuesday, it was clear that he genuinely doesn’t get it. He doesn’t understand the public anger. And thinks his own sleaze storm is merely a passing distraction, something that will be forgotten in a few days when the media cycle spins again.

‘He thinks it’s all a storm in a teacup,’ one minister told me. ‘His attitude is ‘we’ve got serious business to deal with. Just ignore this froth’.’

It wasn’t froth when the Conservatives were in office. Rishi Sunak’s £95 designer sliders. His £180 smart-mug. Boris Johnson’s £840 a roll wallpaper. These were – we were told – not mere Westminster ephemera. But at the heart of who the Tories were, how out of touch they were, and how unsuitable they were for high office.

But it’s now Keir Starmer and his ministers greedily gripping the seals of office. So the rules have apparently altered. All sleaze and cronyism is bad. But some forms of sleaze and cronyism – namely Labour’s brand – is better than others.

And any criticism of it is – to use the Prime Minister’s own phrase – all water off a duck’s back. Britain’s new Napoleon is not going to let public opinion distract him. Why should he? He has a 170-seat majority. His opponents are politically bankrupt, so there is nothing to stand in the way of his Government of Service. Especially not the British people, who will not be relevant to him for at least another three or four years.

So change has indeed come. Twelve months ago in Liverpool Keir Starmer pledged: ‘No more pensioners freezing while energy firms make record profits.’ Now a cut in the winter-fuel allowance is defended as being ‘tough in the short-term, but in the long-term it’s the right thing for the country’.

Last year, he vowed his MPs would ‘have only one job: Service’. This year, those same MPs seem to have to get free tickets to Taylor Swift concerts in order to properly conduct their public duties.

It’s just over two months since Starmer arrived on the steps of Downing Street. In his first speech he observed: ‘Our country has voted, decisively. For change. For national renewal.’

But those voters watching the events of the past few days have seen something wearingly familiar: Cronyism. Sleaze. Politicians not acting in the service of their nation, but to feather their own nests.

In fact, if they’d been watching from the outside and looked at Starmer, then thought back to the Government they so decisively rejected in June, then back at Starmer again, they might have found it almost impossible to tell which was which.