Most normal people only find out the Labour Party Conference is going on when they see clips of the Prime Minister’s speech on the news.
But there’s an awful lot more to it than that.
The event consists of four days packed with panels, talks and shindigs, with the first coffee-fuelled sessions kicking off around 8am and the final booze-fuelled sessions lasting as late as 3am.
Even if you’re the right kind of strange person who’s willing to take a few days off work for a political gathering, it can all get a bit exhausting.
For those who weren’t willing to put themselves through it, here are some of the things you might not have caught on the telly.
Not-MAGA baseball caps
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One of the more bewildering and unexpected sights at this year’s Labour conference was all the people milling around in Trump-style baseball caps.
From a distance, all you could see was that they were the exact same shade of red as the hats made famous by the US President and they had some writing on the front.
Once you were a little closer, you could see it didn’t say ‘Make America Great Again’ – it said ‘Build, Baby, Build’ in a comic book-style font.
This was the brainchild of new Housing Secretary Steve Reed, who wanted to inject a bit of fun into the conference after a bleak few weeks for the party. He even signed a bunch of them.
I have it on good authority that the similarity to the MAGA caps was intended to be ironic, rather than any kind of homage to the The Donald.
Belting it out
One thing you might not know about British politicians is how much they love karaoke.
Well, not all of them. But the ones that do really do.
The Liberal Democrats have their ‘communioke’ night, where the screen faces out to the crowd for the ultimate singalong experience.
In Liverpool, there was a choice of the LabourList karaoke – where you could see Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander giving her rendition of Disco 2000 by Pulp – or the more exclusive Mirror Party.
That was where Health Secretary Wes Streeting treated the crowd to Elton John’s classic Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me, and talented Victims Minister Alex Davies-Jones performed a genuinely impressive You’ll Never Walk Alone for the Hillsborough families.
Good Luck, Milibabe
Ed Miliband has been popping up on TikTok feeds in recent weeks waxing lyrical about his unlikely love for US singer Chappell Roan.
So when greatinsports.com got the chance to chat with the Energy Secretary, we made sure to question him about it (just ahead of the more pressing and important questions, of course).
We asked which Chappell song he’d use to sum up his conference experience so far – but all he could think of was Pink Pony Club, a song which doesn’t really work as an answer but which he is ‘obsessed’ with.
Miliband also told us he still hadn’t quite managed to see her live, but it’s a strong ambition of his.
In the meantime, he’s gonna keep on dancing down in West Hollywood…
AI Attlee
You never really know what you’re going to get when you set off for a party conference, but some things still have the capacity to surprise.
One sure thing at Labour is plenty of chat about Clement Attlee’s transformative postwar government, which introduced the NHS and modern welfare state.
This year was the 80th anniversary of his 1945 victory, and there was some lovely retro merch on offer in the Labour store to mark it.
But eyebrows were raised at data company Datnexa’s introduction of an AI Clement Attlee to provide advice and information about the conference, accessible via the website AskClem.com.
The site claims robo-Clem is ‘customised with Labour Party-specific knowledge’ to ‘revolutionise how attendees engage with conference content’.
Row over ‘racism’
If you saw anything from the Labour conference, it might have involved this.
Sir Keir Starmer grabbed headlines on Sunday by telling the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that he believed Reform’s policy of deporting people currently living legally in the UK with indefinite leave to remain is ‘racist’.
What you might not have seen is just how much this remark set tongues wagging across the conference centre.
The PM had to make clear in further interviews that he doesn’t consider Reform voters or Nigel Farage themselves racist.
Some cabinet ministers, like Justice Secretary David Lammy, leapt with enthusiasm into using the ‘r’ word when talking about Farage, while other figures like Sadiq Khan explained why they hesitated over it.
If the intention was to wind up Farage, it certainly worked – he put a whole video up on social media about it. The question is how his millions of fans will respond.
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