• 02.10.2025

Burnham, Badgers and Blue Labour: a dispatch from the King’s Dock

Clouds gather over the convention hall. Photo: Laurence Thompson/Liverpool Post

For our exciting new politics edition format, we sent Laurence to muckrake around the riverside

Dear readers — Politics is show business for ugly people, said Gore Vidal. If that’s true, Liverpool has been a gargoyle’s catwalk this week. Labour’s party conference is in town, which means the Arena and Convention Centre (ACC) on the King’s Dock has become Mecca for every red rosette wearer in the country.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice this is not the Answers in The Post on new “Pride in Place” funding we previewed in Monday’s briefing. That’s exactly because the conference has dragged so many of my contacts into its implaccable orbit. So, petulantly, I put my schedule on hold and crept down to the waterfront to stalk the local and national bigwigs that I couldn’t get on the phone.

That journey led me from the King’s Dock to Hope Street, into hotel bars and dockside pubs, chatting to everyone from local SPADs to the only British parliamentarian to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Findings include: the New Town for Merseyside, an ex-councillor charged by police, a eulogising moment for Liverpool’s Corbynist left, and a White House to Walton Vale connection.

Welcome to the Post’s first dedicated politics edition, where we’ll be pulling on our trenchcoats and trilbies, heading out into the city and muckraking to bring you the best political gossip and news from around the city region.

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A dispatch from Labour party conference

By Laurence Thompson

Even though Liverpool has hosted the Labour Party’s conference for the last four years, I’ve never been before. I’m assured by those who have that it’s a dazzling showcase of in-fighting, mutual contempt, and barely-concealed self loathing. So this year, I kept to the interzones — dockside bars, alternative events, and nearby cafes to soak up the second-hand atmosphere and drop questions to advisors and delegates sneaking off for a break. With Labour low in the polls, much of the conversations were tentative. But some of it, as we’ll see, was quietly confident.