Finding myself in Liverpool recently, mercifully with no Labour Party conference to attend, I found a metaphor for what it promises in the Walker Art Gallery. John William Waterhouse’s Echo and Narcissus portrays the scene from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which, after her rejection by Narcissus, Echo withdraws from life and wastes away. Her revenge was the spell which caused Narcissus to fall in love with his own reflection.

The Labour Party will gather this weekend in Liverpool to peer at itself in the River Mersey. It might conceivably be the last Labour conference ever in this guise. While the prime minister has been in Salzburg singing for her supper in the attempt to define the future of this country’s most important economic partnership, Labour has