In Liverpool you can feel the change in Labour's chemistry
Under Ed Miliband, the party is moving away from the Whitehall-
knows-best culture, and towards a new bottom-up politics Ed
Miliband walks off the stage on the first day the Labour party's
annual conference Ed Miliband walks off the stage on the first
day of the Labour party's conference in Liverpool. Photograph:
Phil Noble/Reuters  Politics needs human contact. It needs
people looking one another in the eye, arguing and questioning.
In the abstract, the Labour conference seemed a dull prospect.
Labour under Ed Miliband is trudging deep through the wasteland
of opposition, not doing spectacularly well in the polls and
still biffed about by recriminations and point-scoring from the
years in government. Who really wanted to head off to Liverpool?
Plenty haven't. Many Labour figures are conspicuous by their
absence here or are only attending, like David Miliband, for a
single meeting. For months people have been rolling their eyes,
predicting hardly any