Afternoon:
10°c
"Lighten up", Peter Mandelson instructed Gloomy Gordon, and Sarah Brown, as usual, got the message before her husband. She was sporting a lustrous honey-tinted hair colour and had forsaken those forbidding beige and red numbers for a vibrant splash of a floral dress.
Mrs Brown splurged on a tribute to Him Indoors. "He's messy and noisy," she said, but still, "my husband, my hero. That's the reason I love him as much as I do." Meet Homer Simpson, your PM.
Mr Brown arrived wearing his strange Dracula smile and a lot of make-up, hair groomed to flat perfection and a natty Men in Black suit. Depressed, moi? On the contrary, he seemed to be in the grip of a strange euphoria. "We've changed the world!" he cried, several times.
Fifteen million jobs had been saved, internationalism had triumphed over narrow-minded (ie Tory) selfishness. He indulged in a little light banker-bashing, to the delight of the assembly. The Labour Party has gone back into that tribal place where the words it most hankers to hear are the ones it wants to boo. "Banker", "Privileged" and "Trident" are this week's favourites.
Ordinary people wander like wraiths of reality through Brownspeak. "A small businessman came to me in tears...", "The person with a trade, the builder on the site...", Mr Brown loves ordinary people but always has a problem making them sound as if they really exist.
One good gag survived the multiple drafts. An American asks the PM: "How's the special relationship?" Mr Brown replies, "Peter Mandelson and I are getting on very well."
Ancestor worship is compulsory. So conference remembered Neil Kinnock, who never won an election and John Smith who died before he had the chance. "And Tony Blair," his successor added cursorily. Mr Blair would clearly rather undercharge for a speech than attend a Labour conference these days.
But he was missing one of Mr Brown's better speeches: nuanced and wide ranging, and mercifully free of the machine-gunning of statistics which can make him so hard to hear.
He spoke clearly and with some real heart: "It cannot be right for a girl who has a baby at 16 to be given the keys to a council flat and left alone." Eureka, New Labour has discovered a decisive family policy, 12 years into its run.
At the back of everyone's mind the question nagged. Could he reverse the grim defeatism which has hung over this conference? He promised them a referendum on electoral reform and the eradication of hereditary peers. They whooped at that and the skilful filleting of Conservative non-policies.
Labour still loves Gordon. But next year, it will be someone else.
Reader views (1)
That decisive family policy you mention is apparently lifted straight from the BandP manifesto. Another 'British jobs for British workers' quote?
- Dcl, harrow, 29/09/2009 18:10
Report abuse
