Speech brings steeliness and narrative that was missing

When Keir Starmer sat down for a broadcast interview on Sunday, he already had a clear idea of what he wanted to pull off during the Labour party conference in Liverpool.

- Pippa Crerar

He told the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg: "At the end of it people can agree or disagree, but they can't say they don't know what we stand for, what this government is trying to achieve."

While many will - fairly - say that it is an indictment of the prime minister that after more than a year in office he still struggles to articulate his vision, his conference speech yesterday will have gone some way towards doing so.

A constant frustration of Starmer's MPs has been that he does not like - as his allies put it - the "V" word. He is a details-focused pragmatist who takes decisions based on their merits, rather than whether they fit into any particular political story.

But what the leader's speech lacked in policy detail, it made up for in narrative. At its heart was an era-defining choice between Labour and the populist right or, as he put it, "decency or division; renewal or decline".