Keir Starmer’s word salad conference speech was glaringly flawed — and only part of a much broader problem

“The return of the sausages”: well, I never thought I’d hear a prime minister call for that in a party conference speech. Of course, Keir Starmer meant the Israeli hostages in Gaza, and he was quite right to demand that Hamas hand them over. But the moment captured the bathos of a speech whose solemnity was punctured by its own glaring flaws.