Voices: The revolution will not be organised: Your Party descends into farce on day one

1. Voices

A dour, droning speech from Jeremy Corbyn was the least of Your Party’s worries on day one of their Liverpool conference, writes Kat Brown. It will go down in history as a parody of car-crash politics

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Given the disasters surrounding the Budget, Your Party should have been thrilled. It’s made their last three months of in-fighting, budgetary arguments and leadership squabbles seem borderline competent.

Yet within moments of these wannabe leaders launching their first conference, the clown car started filling up. First, a load of members were ousted, following rumours that the Socialist Worker Party was planning a disruption. Second, Jeremy Corbyn’s welcome speech ran late. Third, there was no sign of his co-leader, Zarah Sultana. Fourth, it later turned out that Sultana was boycotting her own conference due to, fifth, “faceless bureaucrats” doing the ousting. Your Party was due to be renamed this weekend; it may as well stay thus so that Sultana can yell it at Corbyn.

“We’re here to do something dramatic – and may I say the hall looks absolutely fantastic – to found a new socialist party in Britain,” Corbyn said, peering out at his anoraked audience. As an opening gambit to a new political party, this was more like welcoming a busload of sightseers to a talk by the local WI. The hall was free of decorations, with some chairs and screens, but as their £800,000 in donations have been withheld by the party founders, presumably they’ve had to save on the bells and whistles. Given how much of the audience was still clad in winter hats, they must have decided to keep the heating off, too.

Jeremy Corbyn is the star of Your Party, but he’s not a gripping speaker. Certainly, Keir Starmer is no showman, unless he’s quipping at PMQs. But watching Corbyn speak is like watching your least public-facing schoolteacher being rolled out on Speech Day because everyone else came down with food poisoning.

“We've got to come together and be united,” said stand-in headmaster Corbyn, eyeing the anoraks beadily, “Because division and disunity will not serve the interests of the people that we want to represent.” Meanwhile, Sultana was furiously briefing the press outside the conference hall. May the left wing never change!

The launch of Your Party – or Our Party, or Popular Alliance, For The Many, or whatever name the 50,000 membership agrees upon in Liverpool this weekend, if indeed it can, is supposed to be a chance for something new, exciting, to send a rocket up the bottoms of the ungrateful voting public. Instead, it’s more of the same, which is rather ironic given Jeremy’s gripes about Labour’s bureaucracy. In the same breath as he decried the “top down” bureaucracy of his former party, he called for an elected executive, a members’ oversight committee and more non-bureaucratic bureaucracy. “I've had enough of top-down parties,” he said, while Sultana’s team briefed about party witch hunts. “I spent a lifetime in the Labour Party, mostly fighting Labour Party bureaucracy. I don't want to repeat that in Your Party. I don't want to repeat that experience.” He added, without turning a hair: “And that will also go in the handbook.”

The stand-in teacher was also wearing his most revolting jacket. There is a particular form of arrogance in dressing quite so badly. I would say that no woman would be so sartorially sloppy, but then Sky News kept showing old photos of Zarah Sultana in a light blue blazer with tortoiseshell buttons, which didn’t help.

Clothing matters. It’s 20 years since Meryl Streep spelt that out in The Devil Wears Prada. What does this blazer say, then, this lumpen, oversized monstrosity with its crimped lapels? Is it the couture equivalent of a burlap sack? Is there nothing better for an audience who have coughed up to be there on a Saturday morning when they could have been marching in support of something (some mournful chants of “Free, Free Palestine” suggested they’d rather have been there instead). How could anyone trust a man who, faced with a wardrobe, a shop, could reach in and somehow decide that yeah, this is fine.

Mind you, this attitude very much extended to the rest of Corbyn’s speech. You’d have thought after 10 years of watching Nigel Farage get away with murder, Corbyn and his team might have spotted what works. Surely someone among the throng of people that he thanked at the beginning might have steered him towards Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York, or Zack Polanski’s campaign for the Greens.

Ah yes, Polanski. For while Corbyn is focused on a two-party opposition and celebrating Your Party’s 50,000 members, the Greens – previously the most unelectable party this side of the Monster Raving Loonies – have reached 170,000 members, making it the third biggest party in the UK. This week, the Greens released a new slogan: Hope is Here, pegged to that rarest of beasts, an enjoyable political party broadcast. Polanski has also shown himself to be unflappable, human and an excellent speaker – exactly the sort of qualities Your Party should be worried about.

Instead, like a latter-day Ron Burgundy, reading anything from an autocue, including mispunctuation, Corbyn droned on: “What has happened to our humanity in our society, where it becomes routine to label people fleeing from environmental disaster enemies? Threats? Tomorrow?” Establishing that “tomorrow” was the one thing that the right-wing had not labelled migrants, Corbyn got back on track. “Tomorrow, they’ll be our doctors. Tomorrow, they’ll be our teachers. Tomorrow, they’ll be our train drivers.” Tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace of having to listen to Jeremy Corbyn read out loud.

Corbyn is steeped in the left-wing stereotypes of the Seventies and Eighties, and indeed, this speech was borne of muesli. There was no overarching takeaway message to inspire the crowd, let alone any potential swing voters watching at home. Instead, we had the full dusty packet stuffing in every problem from the environment, education, council housing, the genocide in Gaza and rent controls to the privatisation of the water industry. All nourishing, but delivered in such a deeply fibrous way that there was nothing for the taste buds or the potential swing voter.

Are we allowed anything delicious in politics again, or do we all just have to suck it up and suffer? As Corbyn’s brows knit together in unison with his puckered lapels, the answer was clear. Not that we’ll have to worry about it. Your Party has collapsed on day one.

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