STARMER HAS SEEN OFF HARD-LEFT BUT HASN’T WON VOTERS’ TRUST

SIR KEIR Starmer and his team are congratulating themselves after turning a chaotic week at the seaside to their advantage.

Labour’s annual conference in Brighton began with party deputy leader Angela Rayner denouncing theTories as “scum” before descending into a series of bitter clashes with the hard-Left.

A frontbencher quit the shadow cabinet in protest at the direction of the party and the leader’s speech was punctuated by boos and heckles.

Yet the mood among Starmer’s aides was buoyant as they headed from the south coast.

“We’ve heard the last roar of the dinosaurs,” one senior party aide told me at the end of the conference, adding: “Keir has seen them off.”

This week’s Labour conference certainly felt very different from the party’s last full gathering two years ago when the Jeremy Corbyn fan club ruled the roost.

More business suits and fewer “Free Palestine”T-shirts could be seen around the conference centre and hotel bars.

Yet Labour has some way to go before convincing all of those repulsed by the hard-Left excess of the Corbyn years.

LordWalney, the former Labour MP John Woodcock, who quit the party and urged voters to back theTories at the last election, said that while the party had a “good week” Starmer had failed to explain his past backing for Corbyn to become Prime Minister.

To move on, Starmer had to be clearer about why the “Corbyn era was an affront” to traditional, mainstream Labour values, the independent peer tweeted.

Many former Labour voters will feel the same. After Corbyn’s election flops, his supporters are so enfeebled within their party that isolated howls of protest were all they had left.

Seeing them off was the easy part for Starmer. Rebuilding trust with voters will prove far more challenging.