This is getting silly

As if political cross-dressing had not gone far enough in recent weeks, with Dave trying frantically to be like Tony but not Maggie, and Gordon trying frantically to be like Maggie but not Tony, we now have the spectacle of Norman Tebbit simultaneously lionising Gordon and rubbishing Dave.

Surely all we need now to complete the circle is for Tony Benn to hail Cameron as the new, authentic voice of democratic socialism.

The next leadership race starts here?

When I first spotted this post on Ben Brogan's blog earlier today I initially thought it was a bit frivolous of him to start speculating about leadership "beauty contests." But in fact Brogan has a very good point.

Despite Gordon Brown's current dominance of the political scene, it should not be forgotten that this could easily be both his first and last conference as Labour leader.

As Brogan points out: "If Brown listens to the hotheads, goes for November, and gets it wrong, we really will be looking for a change candidate."

So just for the sake of argument - and because no party conference would be complete without a bit of leadership speculation - who might that candidate be?

Well, as Iain Dale notes, frontrunner David Miliband has just bored the delegates into slumber for the second year running, although the content of his speech today was largely spot-on.

Brogan himself speculates that energetic Ed Balls could emerge as a runner, although I have long believed that his wife, Yvette Cooper, is really the more talented politician in the Balls household.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson would certainly stand, but at 56 may be considered too old for a gruelling four or five years of opposition before he would have a chance to unseat Prime Minister Cameron in 2011/12.

In my view, the dark horse could well be Jacqui Smith, who has made a great start as Home Secretary and has impeccably New Labour credentials. It will be interesting to see how her speech goes down later in the week.

On a related point, does anyone know why Brown moved the leader's speech to Monday? I guess he must have had his reasons but it's turned the whole of the rest of the conference into a largely meaningless anticlimax.

The conference always tailed off after Tuesday, but I reckon that the extra day's build-up to the old Tuesday afternoon slot was worth at least an extra day's front-page headlines for Labour.

A bad omen?

Not sure if anyone else has spotted this yet.....but who was the last party leader to use the words "I won't let you down" during his inaugural conference speech?

Answer: It was Charles Kennedy, at the Lib Dem conference in Harrogate, in 1999.

Huhne not so ghastly after all

A friend has drawn my attention to this Diary piece in the Times last week in which Matthew Parris withdrew his unsubstantiated slur against "the indefinably ghastly Chris Huhne" published during the Lib Dem leadership contest in February 2006.

Long-standing readers may recall I was fairly critical of Matthew for this at the time and to his credit, he acknowledges as much, saying in his piece: "A noted blogger, Paul Linford, took me to task for this - with justice."

Brown's moral society

He didn't once mention him by name. But make no mistake, David Cameron was the real target of this afternoon's big speech by Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

For weeks, Cameron has been banging on about the "broken society," rightly calculating that social issues, rather than economics, will be uppermost in the voters' minds come the next general election, and believing this will give him the crucial advantage over a Prime Minister still perceived by some as no more than a dour financial manager.

Well, in this afternoon's speech, Brown made clear that if that's where Cameron wishes to stage the election battle, he will be there waiting for him. For this was a speech that was, more than anything, about society - and about Brown's vision of the kind of society he wishes to create over the next few years.

In policy terms, much of it was not new. To take one example, my wife is already in the middle of the nine months' paid maternity leave Brown re-announced this afternoon. But the way he weaved such initiatives together in a convincing overall narrative of his government's moral purpose was both new and potentially devastating for the Conservative opposition.

Central to the speech was Brown's own "moral compass" - something his predecessor was often justifiably accused of lacking. Without being at all preachy about it - New Labour still doesn't officially "do God" - the Prime Minister left no doubt about the importance of his own Christian convictions in determining Labour's future policy direction.

The speech was peppered with Biblical references, from ensuring all children are given a chance to use their gifts (the Parable of the Talents) to his pledge to "honour those who raised us" (the Fifth Commandment.)

This moral dimension is the common thread between, for instance, ensuring that young people from low income families will not have to pay to go to university, and ensuring that immigrants who sell drugs or carry guns will be thrown out and shops that sell alcohol to under-18s closed down.

All in all, I thought it was one of the cleverest leader's speeches I have heard. By not even mentioning the other two parties or their leaders, Brown once again succeeded in presenting himself as a national leader above petty party politicking, the personification of a new style of politics.

Most pleasing to me personally was his announcement that an elected House of Lords would be a Labour manifesto commitment. This is absolutely the right way to proceed with this vexed issue, as it will mean that under the Salisbury Convention, the unelected peers will have no alternative but to vote for their own abolition.

As to the great unanswered question - will there be an autumn general election? - the subliminal message of the speech was, surely, is that Brown is getting on with the job of governing. But at the same time, there are clearly people in Bournemouth who are continuing to stoke up the election talk - which may be real, or may just be a tactic to wind up the Tories and keep the unions and the left on their best behaviour.

It did not, to me, come over as an electioneering speech. But as I am not in Bournemouth and don't know what's being said behind the scenes to those journalists and bloggers who are, I can't be entirely sure that my instincts are correct.

What I am sure of, though, is that Brown knows exactly the ground on which he wishes to fight Cameron, and that he is absolutely confident of success.

Oborne tells it like it is

I was sadly unable to make last Monday's launch party at the Spectator offices for Peter Oborne's new book The Triumph of the Political Class, but he did send me a copy in the post, for which I was very grateful.

I have not yet had a chance to read it from cover to cover, and when I have done, I will post a full review here, but on opening the book, the following passage from the introduction immediately caught my eye.

"This book is based on my fifteen years' day-to-day experience as a reporter, and more recently political columnist, in the press gallery and lobby of the House of Commons. This is an incomparably privileged job, giving one front-row seats in the great political theatre of the day, as well as intimate access to politicians and their senior staff, many of whom I have come to know extremely well.

"After I had been doing this job for a number of years I started to gain a sense that something was wrong. I noticed that the reports of political events put out to the public through newspapers and the broadcasting media were in large part either meaningless or untrue. As I probed further, I gradually became aware that the conventional narrative structure which is used to give sense and meaning to British politics was extremely misleading.

"Though the public is always told that Tory and Labour are in opposition, that is not really the case. They are led to believe that the Liberal Democrats are an insurgent third party, but that is not the case either. It has come to seem to me that their strongest loyalties are to each other.

"For the greatest part of my time as a political reporter, the most bitter rivalries at Westminster have involved factional conflicts within individual parties rather than collisions of ideology and belief."

This is so close to my own experience of British politics during my time in the lobby as to be uncanny, but then again I have long shared Oborne's general analysis of the state of politics - and political journalism - today.

Although I do not quite buy Oborne's contention that Gordon Brown is as much a member of the "political class" as Tony Blair and David Cameron, I suspect that this, far more so than Alastair Campbell's self-serving Diaries, is the must-read volume for anyone who really wants to know how Britain is governed today.