In an overheating hall on the banks of the Clyde, Keir Starmer leaps out of his seat into an even warmer embrace and whispers into the ear of Lorna Downie, an apprentice welder who has just delivered her first ever public speech.
“Although she was feeling really nervous before, I told her she’d absolutely knocked it out of the park,” he recalls later as he heads home. “For her to do that in front of the nation’s press and all the cameras was incredible. I loved it.”
