QUENTIN LETTS: Unite boss’ oratory sawed into delegates’ hangovers

Sharon Graham, leader of the Unite union, was only given a couple of minutes for her speech but that was enough. Short, shouty Sharon doesn’t need a long runway. Her oratory has the explosive acceleration of an aircraft-carrier fighter jet.

It was the last morning of Labour’s conference and a few delegates had overdone it in the disco the previous night. Sore heads prevailed even before Ms Graham blasted forth her high-decibel speech. She may be petite but there is cutting power in that voice. Sharp as a butcher’s cimeter.

‘Solidarity!’ she hollered. Jeepers that stung. Ms Graham complained about Sir Keir Starmer‘s winter fuel payments cut. Her speech evoked the radicalism of Clement Attlee and denounced Sir Keir’s arguments as ‘absolute rubbish!’

Some delegates whooped. Others continued to flinch as her voice sawed into their hangovers.

When she said ‘solidarity’ she punched a clenched left hand in the air. Union delegates, all dressed in short-sleeved black polo shirts, leapt to their feet, cheering and smacking their palms in defiant applause. Having extracted billions from the Starmer government in public-sector pay rises, the unions were now furious that spending elsewhere was having to be trimmed.

Sharon Graham, leader of the Unite union, was only given a couple of minutes for her speech but that was enough, writes Quentin Letts

Short, shouty Sharon doesn’t need a long runway. Her oratory has the explosive acceleration of an aircraft-carrier fighter jet

‘Solidarity!’ she hollered. Ms Graham complained about Sir Keir Starmer’s winter fuel payments cut

Was some of the anger perhaps a little performative? The unions are canny enough to see that a little tension between them and ministers will dilute accusations that they have Sir Keir by the sausage-skin and that they intend to take him for several billion more.

The debate was not all in one direction. Maggie Cosin, a Labour councillor from Dover, announced that she was prosperous enough not to need the £200 she was sent every year for winter fuel. She claimed that she always spent it on supplies for her local food bank. Halo for Maggie, please.

This debate on winter fuel payments should have been held on Monday but the conference agenda committee fixed that problem. In recent days it has repeatedly been alleged that ‘nothing in Britain works any more’ but Labour’s conference agenda committee remains magnificently efficient at stiffing critics of the party leadership. It is a Rolls-Royce operation and a credit to Soviet-era standards of message control.

One delegate complained at the start of proceedings that agreed procedures were being ignored. She was brushed aside effortlessly by Wendy Nichols, the national executive committee member who was chairing this session. Wendy is a figure of heroic inaction, slumped low in her platform chair (she could be driving a Lamborghini) while croaking unimpressed verdicts into her microphone. She would have made a wonderful judge in Robespierre’s France.

So yes, this union composite demanding a rethink on the winter fuels payments had been pushed to the end-of-conference slot, between a debate on artificial intelligence and the singing of the Red Flag. There was time for just three speeches from the floor. That sufficed for the unions to make formulaic noises of protest (while pocketing their pay rises) but it was not enough to kindle dangerous dissent among the rank and file membership.

Sir Keir himself was by this time on the far side of the Atlantic. Last day of a Labour conference invariably feels like losers’ day: the plodders left behind after the club-class smoothies have vanished.

Liz Kendall, work and pensions secretary, claimed that Labour had ‘done more to help pensioners in the last two months than the Tories did in 14 years’. Eh? And Bridget Phillipson, education secretary, snarled her way through a speech that boasted about her VAT tax-whack on private schools. Chilly Bridget kept remembering that she was supposed to smile. It was like watching someone looking in the bathroom mirror to check if they have spinach between their teeth.

The conference ended with a Classic FM sort of version of the Red Flag. Cabinet office minister Pat McFadden, the Andrei Gromyko of Labour frontbenchers, turned up on the platform and threw himself into the singing. A most unlikely Caruso.