ALL around the Labour conference on Merseyside was the slogan “hope again”.

It’s the kind of phrase which stamps out a fresh start for the party under Andy Burnham, but does lead to the natural question: who took the hope away?

Members could’ve been standing in hot dog costumes, as the online meme has it, asking: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this?”

It is, after all, only two years since our local MP, Sir Keir Starmer, entered Downing Street with a majority which should have been big enough to reshape the country in a radical new direction. Now activists have a slogan which sounds like they have all escaped a subjugated kingdom and can breathe in all that hope.

There was certainly some irony in watching some of the same people who appeared to heavily support a hard-line, centrist management of the party now clapping and getting emotional at leftier ideas from the new man at the top. Public ownership: woohoo!

Those who departed the party – at their own will, or not – with a view that it cared more for corporate interests than working people– what were they now thinking as they watched on television?

Either way, as much as Sir Keir was mentioned in passing with thanks for winning a general election, pressing the words “hope again” on every screen wasn’t the kindest response to his time in charge.

Hopefully, he wasn’t watching the new guy getting such love on a scale that was never really shown to him.

He was politely credited with changing the party and winning power, but even pride in the 2024 general election was being reassessed in some corridors as a contest which nearly any Labour leader would have been able to win against an exhausted Conservative government.

Burnham spoke to a near-empty room here in conference four years ago, but once you’re in the hot seat, you get to write the next draft of history.

For now.