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I'll tell you what happens with impossible promises.

You start with far-fetched resolutions.

They're then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code.

And you go through the years sticking to that,

outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs,

and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour Council,

a Labour Council hiring taxis to scuttle round a city, handing out redundancy notices to its own

organs.

That is the unmistakable voice and cadence of Neil Kinnock, and a bit of the unmistakable, unforgettable speech

he made 40 years ago this month at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth on the 1st October

1985. He was taking on in the most visceral, explicit public terms, the militant tendency, a left-wing Trotskyist

organisation which had infiltrated parts of the Labour Party, including taking control of Liverpool

City Council. It was a glittering highlight of Kinnock's leadership, a turning point, if not for his quest to become

Prime Minister, then certainly in the slow grind of taking the party back to government. It has

entered political and speech-making law, beloved of the right of the Labour Party, reviled by the

left. It is perhaps the most famous

conference speech ever given. Up there alongside Margaret Thatcher's Lady is Not For Turning, given a few

years before, or her reaction to the Brighton bomb, only a year before. As the Great Britain-wide

party conferences draw to an end, we thought,

what better moment to bring the man himself now in his 83rd year into the newsagent's studio,

...