Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer was disrupted by repeated heckling by left-wing party delegates during his conference speech in Brighton.

       “Normally this time on a Wednesday it’s the Tories who are heckling me. It doesn’t bother me then – and it doesn’t bother me now,” he said.

       Some of Starmer’s critics held up red cards and shouted “￡15” – a reference to the Labour leader’s refusal to back a ￡15 minimum wage.

       Forced to shout over his detractors early in his speech, Starmer said: “Shouting slogans or changing lives, conference?”

       The Labour leader told hecklers in the hall “you can chant all day,” before going on to claim he had used the conference to “get our own house in order”.

       Thanking party members and loyal Labour voters for “saving this party from obliteration,” Starmer said: “My job as leader is not just to say thank you to the voters who stayed with us – it is to understand and persuade the voters who rejected us.”

       In a pointed message to his critics on the left, he added: “It will not take another election defeat for the Labour party to become an alternative government in which you can trust. That’s why it has been so important to get our own house in order this week and we have done that.”

       Labour’s low-pay policy has been at major bone of contention at the conference, with Andy McDonald quitting as shadow employment rights secretary after being told to argue against a national minimum wage of ￡15 per hour.

       A 2019 photo of Starmer campaigning next to McDonald’s workers fighting for ￡15 minimum wage went viral, as left-winger activists accused him of going back on previous support for the hike.

       A group of MPs from the party’s left bloc used a fringe rally in Brighton on Tuesday evening to criticise the leadership, with Zarah Sultana accusing Sir Keir of “waging war on the left”.

       In scathing remarks, Lloyd Russell-Moyle MP said: “It has been a goddamn awful conference with a goddamn awful leadership.”