Pleased to announce that giroscope is able to post from Manchester thanks to the pot luck of being in one of the rooms in the Britannia Hotel where the wi-fi actually works. Some friends and colleagues have not been so lucky, and the corridors are full of people walking around with laptops trying to find the 'hot spot'. It's just another dab of surrealism on top of what is a very strange hotel, and I will have more to say on that later on when things calm down a little...
...but Gordon Brown's speech to the Labour Conference seems a more immediate and pressing topic to report back to you on. I didn't make it into the conference floor as I only had a balcony pass and I couldn't be bothered with the huge queue to get into the secure zone anyway. So I watched Brown on a (rather fuzzy) TV in a nearby venue. My reaction (shared by many, though not all, of the other people I know who watched it) was that GB said a lot of the right things but not necessarily in the right way. It was solid and uninspiring stuff, which will surprise anyone who has seen Gordon's previous speeches to the conference, which have contained a good measure of fiery plays to the rank and file. But such grandstanding was notable by its absence today.
What probably happened was that Gordon was worried about being seen as too "core" Labour in his appeal, and was trying to reach out, but in doing so, forgot about what's made him such an effective Labour performer in the first place. Certainly the conference floor's reaction was polite but unspectacular, in much the same way as what happened to David Davis at the Tory conference last year. Now I don't believe that Brown is in the kind of state that the Davis campaign got itself into in Blackpool last year - he is starting from a much, much stronger position within the party and still has to be the favourite. Nonetheless, any potential challenger to Gordon will have felt their unplayed hand strengthened by today's underwhelming display.
We are in a strange state of phoney war in the Labour Party at the moment and will probably remain so for several months; but if a strong alternative candidate to Brown does emerge when (or before) Blair steps down, things could get extremely interesting. For reasons that deserve to be a separate post, I believe that if such a challenger emerges, he will be called not John Reid, and certainly not Alan Milburn, but Alan Johnson; but Johnno is most unlikely to show his hand this week. His planning will be going on behind the scenes, and all Johnno has to do is deny that it's going on whilst leaving his options open come next spring. A good conference speech by Johnson on Wednesday would help but is by no means essential; this leadership election remains, probably until April '07 at least, Brown's to lose. And the consensus around the conference seems to be that he made a poor fist of it today.
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Can't say I was impressed by Brown but then again he does nothing to appeal to people like myself beyond tying me in Red Tape and taking ever larger chunks of my income for his own nefarious ends.
His speech on education had me rolling in the aisles. Either through stupidity or more probably disingenuousness, he has failed to note that if his goals on education were realised a vast number of the 800,000 Labour supporters (almost all of whom are unemployable in any Private sector organisation) employed to look after the products of our education system would be redundant. Still, an interesting perspective, to which I may return later......
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