Keir Starmer’s win over party rules can’t mask the tension simmering around Labour conference

Editorial: The spat over internal processes has overshadowed more far-reaching policy discussion

Keir Starmer with Angela Rayner during Labour conference on Sunday (PA)

Not quite Sir Keir Starmer’s Clause IV moment then. Almost 30 years ago Tony Blair asked his desperate party, after four successive general election defeats, to drop an article of socialist faith. There were ructions, but he got his way, and a bland series of 1990s soundbites replaced Edwardian phrase-making and Labour’s very aims and purposes were rewritten.

Sir Keir was looking for rather less. His changes were significant, but required no change to the party’s shibboleths. He wanted to return the election of leader and deputy leader to the old electoral college, which gave unions and MPs a large say in the matter, to make it more difficult for local parties to deselect MPs, and to make policy-making less cumbersome and less reliant on the annual conference. His measures had to be watered down before they had a hope of passing on the conference floor, and even then the vote was tight. Most party members, and virtually the entire general public, won’t notice the difference.

Yet he got his way, and it is now less likely that someone such as Jeremy Corbyn would ever become leader of the party again, and less likely that the kind of policies for which Mr Corbyn was famous would find their way into a Labour manifesto. The Starmer reforms make any performative leadership challenges from the left practically impossible.