Labour has decided to fight the next election on the most leftwing programme for decades. The Tories are still arguing about how to respond
To those who think that there is something backward facing about both our major parties, they had a riposte at their conferences. Theresa May robo-gyrated on to the Tory platform to Dancing Queen, a hit for Abba in 1976. The musical finale of the Labour conference was Children of the Revolution, released by T. Rex in 1972. Don’t get me wrong. Both are fine tunes. The 1970s, a benighted decade in many other ways, did produce a lot of fantastic music. Yet it tells us something about the mindset of the two parties, and the vintage of their leaders, that the search for an appropriate conference soundtrack ended up with songs that were hits more than four decades ago.
Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May were preoccupied with the past in other ways. Both their conference speeches included calls for their respective parties to put aside the bitter divisions of recent months and to unite behind them. Both had a success, albeit one that will likely prove ephemeral. If the leader’s closing speech was all you caught of each conference, you could have been deceived into thinking that both the blue tribe and the red clan are now enthusiastically gathered behind their chiefs. Both helped themselves by delivering more accomplished speeches than usual. Neither is ever going to trouble the compilers of collections of historic oratory, but both cleared the low expectations set for them.
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