The great orator President Obama liked to call out the differences between Wall Street and Main Street in his speeches. For Andy Burnham’s first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister, every moment was rooted in Keble Drive, Old Roan, on Merseyside.
How wouldn’t it be?
Not only because the house the Prime Minister was born in stands just eight miles from where he was making the speech in Liverpool. But because he lost his father only two weeks ago.
The PM’s often emotional speech, was full of Roy Burnham – and grandma Kitty too. Roy was there not just in his determination to fix the system for working class people, or his defining pledge to create a National Care Service – but in the sense of urgency people feel in bereavement, the sudden understanding that it’s later than we think.
This was a kitchen sink speech that did everything, everywhere all at once – a speech that threw the dishwasher too. Among the faithful, gasps were audible, as he grasped one nettle after another – social care, the electoral system, the water companies, even the sting of Brexit.
It was the speech of a man who has stared into the abyss, and thought better to die trying. As he said: “I accept I may pay a political price… but someone has go through the pain of ripping the plaster off.”
But, this is what happens when you elect an English graduate Prime Minister. Burnham is a storyteller, and he wove the thread of his life into the country’s story. At times, that left him tearful – knowing he was about to mention Roy, and finding it even harder than it must have seemed when he listened to it in a hotel suite with his advisors.
He would create the National Care Service, he said, “in memory of my dad and out of complete respect for everyone who cared for him”. And he spoke to care workers and he told them, “you are not invisible to me.”
At other times, he wove a story about how the Conservatives had sold off Britain – homes, energy, water and care, stripped out and sold for profit. “The British right talk about taking back control,” he said, in a passage that earned him a standing ovation. “Never let them forget, they are the ones that gave it away in the first place.”
Burnham, it seems understands only too well that dark forces, some wearing balaclavas, are waiting for this government to fail, and that Labour may never get this chance again. But in the end, this was a speech that was defined by its opening. ‘All Together Now’ – a homage to local boys The Farm – was a call to not just to conference but to country. “Get behind each other,” he said, like Roy might have said to his three sons.
’Everyone In’ is the name of his policy to end rough sleeping. But it also felt like an invitation for the nation to come in from the cold.