The hot dog internet meme: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this?

ALL around the Labour conference on Merseyside was the slogan “hope again”.

It’s the kind of phrase which stamps out a fresh start for the party under Andy Burnham, but does lead to the natural question: who took the hope away?

As such, members could’ve been standing in hot dog costumes, as the online meme has it, asking: “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this?”

It is, after all, two years since our local MP, Sir Keir Starmer, entered Downing Street with a majority which should have been big enough to reshape the country in a radical new direction.

Now the party’s activists have a slogan which sounds like they have all escaped a subjugated kingdom and can finally breathe in all that good hope at last, even though those from Camden at least have been living life under a Labour prime minister, a Labour government, a Labour council, a Labour mayor of London and so on.

There was a certain humour in watching some of the same people who appeared to heavily support a hard-line, centrist management of the party now clapping and getting emotional at leftier ideas from the new man at the top. Public ownership: woohoo! Less right-to-buy: woohoo! They didn’t seem to woohoo so loudly about such things a couple of years ago, it might have got you on an internal watchlist.

Those who departed the party – at their own will, or not – with a view that it had come to care more for corporate interests than working people: what were they now thinking as they watched on television?

Either way, as much as Sir Keir was mentioned in passing with thanks for winning a general election, pressing the words “hope again” on every screen wasn’t the kindest response to his time in charge and his recent departure to spend more time with his Arsenal season ticket.

‘Hope’ is also the one-size fits all tagline of Sagal Abdi-Wali’s by-election campaign in Holborn and St Pancras, although nobody really is explaining why losing Mr Starmer has triggered such sunny new optimism.

It’s a popular word, Ms Abdi-Wali’s rival, Zack Polanski, released a book earlier this year called Hope Is Here and the Green Party’s campaigning literature in previous campaigns has included the line ‘make hope normal again’.

We don’t have time for a court case on which politician copyrighted hope first, you’re at least going back to Barack Obama’s Hope poster in the 2008 US elections, but I prefer to think we’re all affected by the word painted across various bridges in the borough.

The word ‘Hope’ has been seen above the railway bridge in Kentish Town Road for many years

Hopefully, the departed prime minister wasn’t watching his successor getting such love on a scale that was never really shown to him; it would have surely stung. Sure, he was politely credited with changing the party and winning power, but even pride in the 2024 general election was being reassessed in some corridors as a contest which nearly any Labour leader would have been able to win against an exhausted Conservative government.

The drafts of political history are constantly being revised.

Mr Burnham spoke to a near-empty room here in Liverpool at conference four years ago – nobody wanted to buy whatever version of Andy Burnham he was selling then – but how things change and once you’re in the hot seat, you get to write the next episode.

For now.