Next year I’ll finally be leaving my teens – no, I wish!

Rather, it will be 19 years of covering party political conferences. All those years ago when I started the Kindle had just been invented and was the “must have” gadget, Barack Obama moved into the White House and Taylor Swift was a relatively unknown country singer.

Since then, I’ve been to conferences in cities such as Manchester and Birmingham more times than I can remember and also trooped up to Glasgow, down to Brighton, via places such as Blackpool and Doncaster.

I’ve seen Brown bluster, Cameron making the blue rinse brigade swoon, Starmer struggle and as for Truss, that’s probably best forgotten.

But what will stay with me from my time at Liverpool for the Labour conference this week was the spirit surrounding Andy Burnham.

Not since the heady days of Boris-mania has there been the same rock star vibe around a party leader. Back in those BoJo heydays, the party faithful would start queueing FOUR hours before Johnson spoke just to ensure they were at or near the front, and there were similarities this week.

Indeed, when the PM came to the temporary LBC studio in the main conference hall earlier this week, they had to call in extra security as the crowds were ten deep. Candidly, in Sir Keir’s day they would need to have paid people to hang around that long, but we were witnessing the ‘Burnham Bounce’ in all its joyous enthusiasm.

Now it’s important to remember the audience the PM was playing to during his one hour and eight-minute speech. These are the faithful for whom a party conference is akin to a Champions League final. They can even get misty-eyed listening to Angela Rayner or laugh at a gag from John Healey!

So, the fact Mr. Burnham was able to sell socialism to a hall in Liverpool packed with socialists shouldn’t really come as a surprise but having said that, he did do it rather well.

Firstly, he was able to deliver the powerful line that ‘we, as politicians have failed you’ because he has been out of Westminster long enough for that to cut through. And if you’ll allow there is a widespread distrust and even hostility towards politicians currently, that is likely to resonate with the young who are among the most disengaged.

To stick with the idea of an appeal to younger voters, while his decision to scrap the OAP triple lock has caused justified outrage among older voters, candidly Mr. Burnham need not care – and I’ve little doubt he and his team have worked that out.

The problem staring Labour as it haemorrhaged supporters was they were young and defecting in large numbers to the Green Party or possibly the Liberal Democrats. Broadly speaking although commentators are right that pensioners are reliable voters in that they turn out when required, few will be Labour supporters so what’s for Burnham to lose?

Similarly, expressing a desire to explore closer ties with the EU will help attract many of the young back to the Labour fold.

But perhaps what was most striking about the speech to me was what he say and while ‘hope’ can be a powerful emotion and never did Bill Clinton or Barack Obama any harm, it’s certainly not a strategy.

Establishing a National Care Service, improving the National Health Service, buying back and restoring vital utilities and building estates of council houses does not come cheap, and being nearly £3 trillion in debt and having heard the Chancellor say just 24-hours earlier the coffers were bare, where was a little more detail on how it will all be funded as his ‘triple lock shocker’ won’t get anywhere near paying enough to fund those ambitions?

Also given the valid concern by many that although the number of migrant crossings is down, it still seems our borders are as leaky as a colander and one smiling reference to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood was not enough.

Similarly on the missing list was defence (apart from a brief reference to Ukraine and visiting President Zelensky), anything about law and order and policing or new policies in education.

In a one-on-one interview with the PM an hour after the speech I challenged him about this, and he fairly pointed out that as he compiled the speech there “was everything on the desk and I only had so much time.”

He added: ‘I felt my job here was to get my vision out there, where Britain can go and how we get there.’

In that he succeeded and when I mentioned how well he had manged to speak about his father with such emotion, having lost him just two weeks ago, he shared with me that the funeral doesn’t even take place until tomorrow (Friday). For a grieving son, that was hugely impressive.

Ultimately, Mr. Burnham can reflect on job well done even if at times it was bit happy clappy (or should that be ‘hopey clappy?’) and the nirvana to which he believes we can stride is ten years away! Remember, “a week is a long time in politics.”

But perhaps his greatest asset is as simple as he’s not Sir Keir Starmer.

After all, and having been in the room where it happened, when Burnham stands up his crowd says “Wow!” When Starmer stood up, the crowd said “Why?”

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