It was one of the best speeches a Labour leader has given in years – confident, emotional and, above all, unusually bold. Andy Burnham has waited 16 years for this moment and, after months of us all asking what he was going to do with it, we finally know.
For the last few years, every Labour conference I have been to has been dominated by murmurs at the hotel bars about the man in Manchester: whether he would find a seat, whether the party machine would let him return to Westminster and whether this was finally the year he would mount a challenge for the top job. The Jacobites had a toast for that kind of longing: to the King over the Water. In Liverpool this week, nobody was raising it – Burnham is finally king and, more importantly, when his moment came, he seemed ready for it.