LABOUR must urgently work to reunite its fracturing coalition of voters, deputy leader candidate Lucy Powell told party conference delegates today.

Taking part in campaign hustings with her rival, Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, at the close of the Liverpool conference, she warned that Labour was losing more votes to its left than to Reform.

“When we bring in policies that do not show what side we are on, like winter fuel, that hits us hard in traditional areas,” Ms Powell said.

She also criticised the government for “ceding the political megaphone” to Reform for far too long.

She said it had made “big mistakes” which should not be “sugar-coated,” something she attributed to “fewer and fewer people taking decisions that are not connected to the communities that we represent.”

Ms Powell emphasised that she would be a full-time deputy leader of the party, making the most of her involuntary freedom from Cabinet responsibility since she was sacked as Commons leader in the recent reshuffle. She pledged to “speak truth to power” but not to “snipe.”

Ms Phillipson, who doesn’t have the luxury of being able to distance herself from a highly unpopular administration, could do no more than acknowledge mistakes on welfare reform and winter fuel which the government has already U-turned on.

Her pitch was that being at the Cabinet table would be an advantage. Indeed, there is no known precedent for Labour in office having a deputy leader who is not a member of the government.

The Education Secretary claimed that Ms Powell would be an agent of division, saying the choice was between pushing “our government to be bolder, to go further, to do more, with me as your voice at the Cabinet table.

“Or you can choose division and disunity that fills the pages of the right-wing papers and puts us back on the road to opposition.”

The hustings hardly added much enlightenment for party members considering their vote, since it consisted of pre-filtered soft-ball questions mainly eliciting platitudinous answers from both candidates.

However, Ms Powell did acknowledge that there were strains in her family over Labour’s record in office. She said of her 21-year-old son that “him and his friends have really struggled with me actually being in the Labour government this last 15 months, because we’ve not got some of the politics right to enthuse young people, to make them see that a Labour government is not just working on their behalf but can make the change that they want to see.”