The winners and losers of this year’s conference season

Conference season 2023 is done and dusted, with punchy Wes Streeting having performed the final significant act yesterday via his speech depicting Labour as the great engine of NHS reform.

How has it gone? Who has done best? Has it changed the political weather overall? Those who have attended all of it will have their view, but so do those of us who followed conference coverage and news bulletins from, as they say, ‘the comfort of our armchairs’.

These are my top ten TV takeaways:

1. Keir Starmer emerged personally strengthened. His unflappable demeanour during the ‘glittergate’ rumpus will have cut through with the electorate. He showed nerves of steel and an impressive determination not to be deflected from his major task by ‘that idiot’. To put it in Desmond Morris anthropological terms, the episode has finally made him a political ‘silverback’. It also helped that what followed was the best speech of his political career skilfully eviscerating the Tories and setting out a Labour programme of renewal in pretty reasonable terms.