Can Starmer convince voters to back his vision of Labour?

Here in Liverpool, at the start of Labour conference, politics feels more familiar than it has for many years, and also quite confusing and not wholly predictable. And the cause, mostly, is Friday’s budget, which very deliberately delivered the bulk of additional income from tax cuts to those on highest earnings.

This feels in many ways like a return to the kind of class based politics – what used to be called class war – we haven’t seen since the Thatcher years of the 1980s. After all, ever since the election of Blair’s New Labour in 1997 we are all supposed to be middle class.

So you might think, 18 years after Labour last won an election, that it would suit Keir Starmer and the Labour party down to the ground to paint the Tories as simply on the side of the rich and privileged. But it is a bit more complicated for them than you might think.