The stage invasion at the start of Keir Starmer’s speech was a total failure for the protestor who carried it out, and a huge success for the Labour leader. It wasn’t clear what he was shouting about as he dumped a load of glitter over Starmer and was then carried out of the hall. Starmer, though, had the chance to react calmly, make the point about his party being about power not protest, and roll up his sleeves as though he was ready to get going with rebuilding Britain.

He joked to the conference that if the protestor thought that would bother him, ‘he doesn’t know me’. Aside from a Labour colleague appearing on stage to say ‘we’re going to take the jacket off’, Starmer barely skipped a beat and went on to deliver one of his best speeches so far.

The address itself was, as Starmer himself said, intended to answer the question of ‘why Labour’. His answer was ‘a plan for a Britain built to last’. It was a very good speech: a confident one that showed Starmer really thinks he could be in government within a year, but also one that repeatedly underlined to the Labour activists watching how difficult it was going to be to achieve the things he wanted if they did make it into government, if they get into power.

The promises he made in the speech did not amount to a cautious approach to government

Starmer has always devoted passages of his speeches to Labour’s heritage, largely as a way of reminding his party that it should want to be in power. Today, he wrapped that together with a warning about what being in government would be like. ‘If you think our job in 1997 was to rebuild a crumbling public realm, that in 1964 it was to modernise an economy left behind by the pace of technology, that in 1945, to rebuild a new Britain out of the trauma of collective sacrifice, then in 2024, it will have to be all three.’ As he drew to the end, he warned his party to be ‘disciplined’ as it headed for an election, and that the Tories would cross all the lines in trying to hold onto power.

The promises he made in the speech did not amount to a cautious approach to government. Starmer told the hall that Labour were ‘the modernisers’ and ‘the builders’. He also rejected the idea that Labour would be there just to ‘manage the shop’ and ridiculed those who ‘will say don’t rock the boat, we’ve always done it like this’. He promised to ‘bulldoze through’ the obstacles to growth caused by the planning system including with a new generation of New Towns; said ‘this has to be the government that finally transforms the NHS: we can’t go on like this’; promised to ‘speed ahead’ on climate policies; and insisted that private enterprise was what drove growth in the economy. There were huge public policy failures that he left out, despite complaining (rather like Rishi Sunak did last week) that politics wasn’t working. There wasn’t anything on social care, which will hamper any NHS transformation until it is reformed.

Last week’s Conservative conference did not feel like an event just before a party went into election campaign. This Labour meeting has, as did Starmer’s speech. His confidence about what the next year could lead to was clear. His party seemed to agree with him.