With that JCB bucket of a jaw, there is something of the lurching bulldozer to Angela Rayner. Operators need to be careful. After you fire up the engine, too heavy a boot on the pedal can cause unintended damage.

Crump! Did she just call a couple of Reform-supporting billionaires ‘fascist oligarchs’? For the sake of the Government’s defamation lawyers, we must hope the Reform chaps do not take offence.

Labour strategists had agreed, maniacs, that Mrs Rayner should address the TUC’s conference in rough-hewn Brighton. The Lib Dems are also heading to Brighton in a few days for their conference. The city’s fleshpots will do better from the Comrades.

After a few glory days for English’s oyster bar (Dover sole £58), Ed Davey’s moth-eaten masses will turn up with packed baps and a thermos of weak tea.

The TUC loves Big Ange and she loves them right back. They are both shameless with a lust for power. Unions have paid millions of pounds to Labour; she, by way of returning the affection, pushed Sir Keir Starmer to agree to the Employment Rights Bill. Since then, Sir Keir has been vapourised and an even more Left-wing prime minister is now in situ.

Mrs Rayner’s arrival on stage mid-afternoon occasioned hugs, kisses and applause. How she beamed. It is a sleek Mrs Rayner these days. That spell out of office, after she resigned as deputy PM over a property tax row, did wonders for her image.

She sat at the top table alongside a slightly dull chairman whose favourite expression was ‘thanking you’. As the conference’s composites were passed with 99 per cent majorities he scrunched up each motion and dropped it beneath his legs. TUC motions seldom signify much and the speeches were abysmal. Never mind.

The real point of a TUC conference is to have a few days of late-summer sunshine at the seaside on expenses, get bladdered and remind Labour MPs who’s boss.

Mrs Rayner smiled enormously and blew kisses at hundreds of devotees sitting in the darkened hall under a ‘Unity Works’ banner. This was home territory for her, not just because her new £700,000 sea-front home was sited just a few blocks away. It was from the TUC that she sprang and to the TUC that she will continue to pay her dues.

A confident sashay to the lectern, a triumphant shake of barnet, and she was off, ladling just about enough praise on Andy Burnham for ‘bringing back hope’. What she possibly meant was ‘bringing back lovely MEEEE’.

Mr Burnham revived a Cabinet career that looked finished under Sir Keir. How quickly we have all forgotten about the nasal knight. The only mention I heard of the poor sausage during the debates was a derogatory one about his attitude to the Civil Service.

‘Only Labour is the party of work,’ averred Mrs Rayner. Unemployment statistics were not mentioned. The real purpose of her speech was to attack Reform and its £72million windfall from two businessmen. ‘Nigel Farage’s sugar daddies,’ was what Mrs Rayner called them. Her own sugar daddies in the union movement did not react much. The TUC is never an easy gig.

She dismissed the argument that Reform’s £72million was comparable to the loot the unions give Labour.

‘We,’ she said, ‘will defend our democracy and society from any foreign dictator or fascist oligarch who seeks to divide our country and buy our politics.’ I’m no libel lawyer but if defamation courts were like football, that one might be looked at closely by VAR.

The only other thing to report from the TUC was how middle-class it is nowadays.

The agitators included numerous radiographers and physiotherapists, the First Division Association of mandarins, a luvvie from Equity, a nerd from the nuclear regulator and a pretty well-spoken chiropodist who put his foot down – no one does it better – to insist that podiatrists were working-class.

A blistering speech.