After Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference on Tuesday, one veteran factionalist declared: ‘We are all Burnhamites now.’ Romantics love the rhetoric; cynics respect the ruthlessness. ‘Game recognises game,’ says one Labour figure.

The Prime Minister’s address was pitched at a wounded party seeking support. Emotive and personal, yet also intensely political, it showed a keen awareness not just of Labour’s values, but of its interests too. Right to Buy, which attracted legions to the Tory ranks, will be halted for new homes; a new National Care Service will bring thousands more members into the unions’ fold. Progressivism will be entrenched in the model Burnham chooses, with devolution imposed on his terms: mayors allowed to spend more, but restricted from cutting tax. ‘We have a politician as Prime Minister,’ says a young MP approvingly.

Even by the standards of a party conference, this year’s Labour jamboree was peculiarly nostalgic

Even by the standards of a party conference, this year’s Labour jamboree was peculiarly nostalgic

The new leader understands that, for all its talk of radicalism, Labour is instinctively a conservative beast. Even by the standards of a party conference, this year’s jamboree was a peculiarly nostalgic affair, full of references to HP sauce, miners’ lamps and northern soul. In his bid to roll back Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s settlement on buses, houses, water and more, Burnham was attempting to construct a 21st-century version of the postwar Labour bargain.

The dominant political operator of that pre-Thatcher age, of course, was the figure who loomed larger over this........

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