It’s game over for Labour in Brighton

It feels like an Irish wake here at Labour party conference. People are happy to see each other, but sad at the circumstances of the gathering. I’m blogging this from the reception of Brighton Grand Hotel – the designated conference hotel is always the main venue for getting bladdered, and for nursing a morning hangover. It seems that every third person is a journalist. Ministers, who would once pass journalists aloofly, now stop to say hello. This is how oppositions behave.

Talk turns quickly to the post defeat leadership election and the nightmares that await. I featured in a “meet some evil right wingers” freak show fringe meeting, chaired by Polly Toynbee, which was packed in a way it wouldn’t have been even last year. Special advisers are grimly discussing what careers will be pursuing next June.

Brighton was last night teaming with students on freshers’ night pub crawl, none of whom seem to care in the slightest about the government ministers in the bars everywhere.