Hello and welcome to rock and roll politics, the podcast with me, Steve Richards, coming this

week live from Liverpool for the Labour Party conference, probably for the Labour Party

conference as if I'm at the heart of the Labour Party conference. I'm here trying to make sense

of it all as you must be as well.

And it's a curious conference.

It should be celebratory almost without qualification.

Labor doesn't win many elections.

It won a landslide just a few months ago.

And there is an element, rightly, justifiably, of celebration.

Ministers preface their speeches by saying, you know, I'm the first Labour Chancellor to speak at a Labour Party conference for 14 years,

a reminder of how long it has been since they were last in power and that they are

now back there, etc., etc. But there is also doubt around this conference in private conversations

with cabinet ministers and others about the direction the government is taking and the various

crises that have erupted, which I think actually in origin are relatively trivial,

though they weren't handled. Well, some of you disagree. I've had a lot of emails about the clothing

stuff, the free clothes and Arsenal Football Club and all that kind of thing. But the fundamental

doubt is real and justified, and it's where politics and economics come together.

Rachel Reeves is a good speaker, she always has been, and one of the advantages of a party

conference is that a chancellor, a prime minister in particular, but of course other cabinet

members too, have an opportunity and no choice

but to try and explain what they are trying to do and crucially why they are trying to do it.

And so there have been tonal shifts from Rachel Reeves, Kirstama and others, about the, to use a terrible

...