Sometimes all that is needed to rally the troops is to point at the enemy and shout: “Charge!”.
This is exactly what Keir Starmer started doing in his speech in London on Friday and has continued to do every day since. And it is working.
People arriving in Liverpool for the Labour Party conference this week were expecting to come to a wake for a government that has barely stuttered into life.
The script appeared to have been written. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the conference darling and saviour, and Keir Starmer continuing to struggle to articulate exactly why he should remain as leader.
But Sir Keir has looked anything but defeated, beleaguered or on his way out.
The prime minister has been very visible during a surprisingly upbeat conference and looks energised and ready for the fight.
This energy seems to be seeping down to the ministers, MPs and party members too. It has left Burnham and his travelling media circus looking a little odd and out of place with his own message of change within the party.
Certainly on contact with The Independent in the hotel bar and elsewhere, the prime minister looked relaxed and, for the first time, as if he was enjoying the job he won in such convincing style last year.
Indeed, there is no sense of a party languishing 10 points behind Reform UK in the polls or one which had, as one minister put it, a “dreadful” run up to the conference with the forced departures of Angela Rayner and Lord Mandelson.
What has happened is that Sir Keir and his team have decided at last that not only is Nigel Farage and Reform the enemy, but have articulated it in a way which rallies not just Labour members but centrist Britain more widely.
The choice between “reason and racism” and “decency and division” is language which appeals to a party base that was up for a fight.
A party which is now focussing on the real enemy – Reform.
It is clear that Starmer made his decision in recent weeks following Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march and then Farage’s threat to deport legal migrants. A Rubicon was crossed.
He and his advisers have also now decided that the only real fight is with Farage and Reform. They have in effect now discounted Kemi Badenoch and the Tories as a serious electoral threat. The polls are not lying.
But it is clear that this is a fight Sir Keir believes he can win. When he gives his speech tomorrow (Tuesday) it will be about vision and values. It will be a deliberate appeal to a much wider audience than Labour card carrying members.
Sir Keir wants to unite and rally the British people in common cause for decency and tolerance against the grievance espoused by Farage.
There is a risk not least in tarnishing all those who vote Reform. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment about Trump supporters still haunts the centre left.
This is why it has taken months of strategising and debate within the leadership of Labour to get to this point. But now that they have, Sir Keir looks happier than he has done at any point in his premiership.
Maybe the claim that he is at his best “when his back is to the wall” is true.
The talk about him facing a potential coup after the May elections next year has not gone away though. At least though Sir Keir now has a strategy that his party can get behind.
