Across the pond

And it’s still changing. I was not wrong to assert  that Prompt Corner, which Orwell dearly loved, had become a hairdressing salon. I know for certain because one of my daughter’s friends learnt the trade there. But when I walked past today, after writing this morning’s blog, the furniture was all piled up. The present owners are a restaurant called Le Pain Quotiden, and since they had some old looking menu’s in the window, they must have  been  there a few years. Without me noticing because South End Green has so many restaurants these days (including a Starbucks) that I don’t like to acknowledge their existence.

The new owners are clearly aware of the commercial value of Orwell because there is a very new-looking plaque on the wall, announcing that George  Orwell not only visited there, but worked there, in 1934 and 1935. So that led me to speculate on what ‘Le Pain Quotiden’ means, when it is translated into English. Since my French is awful, and I did not even have my mobile phone with me, to check the facts, I had to speculate. It could not surely be ‘Bread and Dripping’. But it might be ‘Bread with Quotes’

Which is a slogan which reasonates with people who have read  Orwell. He first made his mark with The Road to Wigan Pier, when he voyaged to the north-west of England to report on the plight of the British Working Classes during the Great Depression. His perspective was  that of an Old Etonian with a conscience.  He discovered, amongst other things, that the working classes were spending what little money they had on food which was bad for them.

Like bread and dripping.

Fast forward to 2008, when we have another Old Etonian with a conscience, David Cameron, is Conservative leader and Prime Minister in Waiting. And when we have hundreds of journalists, Government ministers and Opposition leaders, seeking to save the working classes from themselves. Because they eating so many cheapish fast foods, that they are getting so obese that it is a grave threat to their health. Egged on by the advertising of the ’capitalists’, earning their bonuses  by promoting the fast food chains.

So what Orwell wrote, is still well worth reading. But it needs to be put into the context of the times.

Bread and dripping is not going to kill you. But it probably is not as good for your health at breakfast as fruit and salad and Alpen type cereal. Surely not as bad as bacon and eggs and sausages, which the British working classes of the 1930s could not afford every day. 

As it happens I was brought up on bread and dripping and I don’t think that it has done me much harm.

But I do find it difficult to get in the local restaurants. And even at home, where my wife wants me to relish in breakfast with croissants, her being a Francophile.

Which brings me back to ‘Le Pain Quotiden’, whose window is also full of notices of their planning application to Camden Council, for permission to put six tables and twelve chairs on the pavement outside what used to be Prompt Corner. Another phase in the Frenchification of Hampstead. But the Council will probably give them the go-ahead, because, unlike in Orwell’s time, most of the many cafes in South End Road, have tables on the pavement and have done for several  years.

So far, so good. But when I read the plaque about Orwell, I felt ashamed.

Yes, even trained journalists feel shame.

Because when Orwell worked there, Prompt Corner was a bookshop, and he was not employed as a waiter, but as an assistant in the bookshop, helping people to choose the books which would enlarge their vision of the world.

I knew this, of course. So how come that I had forgotten the ‘facts’ when I  wrote my blog this morning? My answer, which the shrinks in the white coats may not agree with, when they come to get me, is simply that my memory was focussing on facts salient to me.

Which is a real problem for journalists in the Northcliffe tradition. Even the honest journalists, concerned to report the ‘facts’ notice some facts more than others. Those that are ‘salient’ to them.

And for me Prompt Corner, was not a bookshop, it was a cafe serving Espresso coffee, when I first went there in the 1950s. I went there because it was a place I could go, spending as little money as possible, where I could chat up the women. I loved it, because the women I  chatted up there, had actually heard of Jean Paul Satres and Simone de Beauvoir. So  it made me feel that I was not entirely foolish in leaving the Wolverhamton of my youth.

So, when I walked back up the hill to my flat, I was appalled at my own mistake, and tried to look with eyes of George Orwell, who, like me, practised journalism, but he did it rather better than me.

What would he have thought, making this walk, 74 years after he lived here?

First, he would have passed the Railway Tavern, or that is what it used to be called because it was next to Hampstead Heath railway station, and had a working class clientele, who liked a sing song on a Saturday night. Now it is the Garden something or other, and is trying to attract the monied classes, who like to drink outside, as well as in, though the ‘garden’ of the former Railway Tavern, only warrants the name because it is out-doors.

Then I  passed on my left what used to be Barclays Bank, where Orwell may have gone to cash his meagre royalty cheques. He made big money after he was dead, like not a few writers.

Barclays, in my day as well as Orwell’s, was a seriously good banking firm, who advised people not to ruin themselves. They would not give mortgages  more than three times annual earnings. But in the world of the Thatcherite/Reagan boom bankers on both sides of the Atlantic, were encouraging people to borrow up to nine times annual earnings. Fine. If you don’t get made redundant. Or if  property prices do not continue to go ever upward.

When Barclays decided that its South End Green site was no longer economic, there was a revolt by  the locals, led by Pam Gilby, of the gin family, who was running the  neighbbourhood group, the South End Green Association. Barclays won. The closed the bank. But SEGA’s rear guard action won something. The hole in the wall of Barclays Bank is still there. So the middle classes can still get your cash there, even  though Barclays has sold the site.

To, who knows. But what used to be Barclays Bank is now, a Pizza place, fattening the working classes, and a newsagents/tobaconists.  The latter does not advertise his name. The shop sign is The Times. Although he sells a vast selection of international newspapers as well as all the Brit papers. So how come he gives The Times all this free publcity? Maybe Rupert Murdoch  owns the site!!!

Continuing on Orwell would have found that South End Road still has a half-way decent bookshop, where the assistants are doing what he did: encouraging people to read books which told them about worlds they have not experienced.

Whether George Orwell, if he were alive today, would have worked for the Murdoch Times, or for The Observer, which though it is owned by The Guardian, peddles lots of stuff encouraging young women to starve themselves. In order to be thin, which is how City bankers, apparently, like their women.

But I think he would still be quite happy to live in these parts. Because there are pubs  which have ‘gardens’ where you can smoke, without Big Brother clapping you into jail. And there are plenty of people around here, who have actually read his books and would be eager to talk about them with him.

Enjoying the winter sunshine in the new flat at Parliament Court. Watching the artists and writers walk down the hill to collect their morning newspaper and take coffee at one of the many restaurants that George Orwell so much enjoyed when he lived here. (Sadly, they can’t stop in at Prompt Corner because it is now a hairdresser.)

At least they look like artists and writers. But they could well be ex-City bankers who have cashed in the bonuses of the  boom years, taken early retirement, and are now living the life they always dreamed of.

In the other direction I have been watching the trains go by, gazing over my old neighbourhood of Gospel Oak and waving to Alastair Campbell, who seems to be much enjoying his own not entirely voluntary early retirement. No  more running around after Tony Blair and sweet talking potential Labour fund rising, but writing quite passable fiction.

Must go now. Bill Oddie has just passed on his way up the hill. Methinks I will follow him and watch a few birds of the feathered variety.

Thanks to an American blogger, John Evans, I have found another name for my newly discovered disability, shorter and catchier than Baron Dupuytren’s syndrome. Though the French baron idenified it in 1841 the condition was apparently rife among the Vikings. Follow this link to Evans’ light-hearted comment, ‘Hey, I’m a Viking’. For a fuller explanation of the medical side, as well as the history, go to the Baylor University medical center site.

Although the disease has been around since the pirates in the long boats were the fastest thing afloat nearly two centuries ago, the medics still have no idea what causes it. But they think it is an hereditary condition, not an occupational disease caused by rowing or bashing away at the keyboard. It begins with a thickening of the muscles on the palm of the hand, which pulls back the fingers, so that you can no longer lay your hands flat down on the table. Most often it affects the ring finger first, followed by the little finger. In my case it is the little finger on my right hand, which is now permanently crooked. But the ring fingers of both my hands also a bit crooked.

The condition is found mostly in Europeans and particularly those of Viking and Norman descent. Most Brits have some Viking blood but it has been quite a shock to me realise that I probably have more Viking genes than anything else. It should have been obvious to me, since I am tall, light-skinned and blue-eyed. Not blonde, but apparently there were many brown haired Vikings and not a few red heads, like Erik the Red.

But I have lived most of my life believing that it was Celtic genes which were driving my passion for literature and music. Mainly because I am a Jones of my father’s side and a Hughes on my mother’s. However, thanks to exhaustive research by my cousin, Colin Gough, I now know that the Hugheses have lived within a few miles of Wolverhampton since the sixteenth century. My own efforts have got back as far as 1800 on the Jones side, when they were in Walsall, all of six miles from Wolverhampton.

So I have to accept that I may not have any Celtic genes at all and that I am descended from axe-weilding pirates, who raped and pillaged England in the first century AD.

Now I am over the shock I can live with being a Viking. After all they were not all pirates. They were story tellers with a rich literature. And they had a system of social order far more democratic than most countries at the time.

And, of course, they spawned King Canute (or Cnut, as the historians like to call him). Now, Canute came to power through the sword but he established peace and order. For political reasons he married the widow of Ethelred the Unready, whom he defeated. But the love of his life was his mistress, one Aelgifu, a lass from Mercia, which covers the some part of the country as the Midlands, where my ancestors mostly lived.

We awoke this morning in our flat in Parliament Court to the first day of winter. Snow flakes were drifting past the window and there was a sprinkling of snow on he roof tops. But by the time we had breakfasted it seemed like the last day of summer.

The sun was blazing directly above the Royal Free Hospital, which surely must be one of the ugliest buildins in London. This morning it was in shadow, a dark grey untidy cube. Folks around here say that the best view of the Royal Free is from the inside looking out, where you can see Hampstead Heath to the north and a panoramic view of Westminster and the City to south.

Looking the other way from our flat across the railway line you can see the roof of the Emirates Stadium, where Manchester City were trouncing Arsenal 3-Nil yesterday. I am too far away to hear the crowd. But inside my head yesterday I did hear the Molineux roar; the Wolves were at home to Blackpool. They won 2-Nil giving them a six point lead at the top of the Championship. If they go on like this they will be playing at the Emirates Stadium next season and hopefully outplaying the Gunners whose current team is rubbish compared to the teams chosen and managed by the Wolves Billy Wright in the days when i still followed football every week.

Now that Barack Obama has won the election I can say, without any fear that my blog might damage his chances, that deep within the heart of Barack Obama there lurks the spirit of the British romantic poets, whose hopes were dashed by the leaders who took power after the French Revolution, and who lived to mourn the fall of France to the new imperialist, Napoleon Bonaparte.

In my view, Obama is a true revolutionary, imbued with the spirit of the founding fathers of the US, who sailed away from England to create their own Utopia. But American independence from the British crown was won after a bitter war of independence, when the Generals, including George Washington, ousted the Brits by firepower.

Obama, by contrast, came to power via the ballot box, and with no allegations so far of vote rigging. So his victory is a triumpth for democracy. And, note, that far from executing his opponents, he is offering them a place in his government, which takes power shortly after my 75th birthday in January.

So I write tonight full of hope, for myself, for my children and, above all, for my grandchildren. Which does not mean that I underestimate the difficulties he faces, including the recession, which I am now convinced is going to be the worst since the 1930s. I don’t want to speculate just who he will have in his cabinet, whether Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State and whether John McCain, might be enlisted as an ally.

The point is that it is now clear that Obama is going to a different President than any President in history. Not another Jack Kennedy, nor a black Bill Clinton, not even a twenty-first century version of Franklin D Roosevelt. But his own man, an unusual mixture of romantic poet, Harvard egg-head, political organiser.

So I am full of hope. But dismayed. Because although I have repeatedly said that this is the most important US election of my life-time, I have not written a blog since 5 November. And that blog was full of mistakes which I have not had time to correct.

Problem is that a lot has been happening in my own life, which has required my full attention, and damaged my ability to blog.

I have been seeking to follow my own dream of 2006, buying a bungalow by the seaside and a flat in town. The bungalow was bought in August 2007, but there were no flats available we could afford, so I have been renting a second floor flat, whereas I need to pause to catch my breath at first floor level.

The good news is that we found a ground floor flat we liked and could afford in early September. It should have been easy and quick. But thanks to legal complications, which my lawyer had to investigate and minor calamities while the decorators were doing their job once we had taken possession, we did not actualy move in til last Saturday. And we had to leave at dawn on Monday morning to meet commitments is Dorset, where I am now.

The decorators stopped work on their second day, because the loo had flooded. This was because the plumbers who fitted the new bathroom of my vendor, just over two years ago, had fitted the wrong innards. Which I did not know for sure, until my own plumber made it right in less than two hours on Saturday, while the removal men were putting our possessions from our rented flat into their van.

But I was already incapacitated, because in hurrying to meet the plumber I had slipped on wet leaves and ‘dislocated my little finger’. The duty doctor at Royal Free accident and emergency, injected my and attempted to pull it straight. When that did not work, he called in his boss man, who turned over my hands, and told me that I had Dupuytren’s Contrature, which was indentified by Baron Dupuytren in 1831. He thought it was caused by too many years of holding on to the reins of his horse.

Now, 177 years later, the doctors are sure that this was not the cause, but they have no idea what the actual cause is. Pictures, and more thoughts on this in a later blog.

The Royal Free man said that I should go to to my doctor and get him to get me an appointment with a consultant surgeon who would operate to repair my hands. I saw my doctor in Dorset yesterday, who confirmed the diagnosis, but said that I need not have an operation, unless my crooked little finger and the bumps on my hands prevented me doing what I needed to do.

Which they don’t. Which is why I am able to write this blog.

And why I am able to get back to thinking about Obama’s election and what it means to the world. Not tonight.

But over dinner my wife passed across the table the picture below of three pregnant ladies, who all happen to be friends of my eldest daughter’s. And the picture was taken on Hampstead Heath about 200 yards from my new flat.

The products of those pregnancies are now growing up. And thanks to the election of Obama, I am hopeful that they will be able to grow up and enjoy the ‘country in the town’ which is Hampstead Heath.

And be inspired by the poetry of the romantics – Keat’s Ode to a Nightingale was written two hundred yards away. And the prose of George Orwell, some of which was written in the Prompt Corner cafe, two hundred yards in the opposite direction.

God Bless America. And all those Americans, including Obama, who still strive to make a better world than the one we inhabit.

Despite the meltdown and the continuing credit crunch the London property market has not ground to halt. I can tell you on first hand evidence. Because on Friday, around 5 PM we completed on the purchase of a London flat to replace the flat we have been renting since April of last year. So all readers of The Daily Novel should know that I have put my money where my mouth is.

What we are facing at present is a crisis of confidence. This has been evident to me over the past few weeks, when I have had to deal with all sorts of advice that we should NOT buy this flat. So although what I have to say in this post is typical journalistic anecdotal evidence, it does reflect the crisis of confidence that is deterring thousands of people who are wanting to move home.

What has changed during the last few weeks is not the reality situation, it is the public perception of it. But I have not had time to blog about this, because my time has been consumed in meeting the objections to my own modest purchase.

So  this blog is just about one UK property purchaser, wanting to buy a flat in a 1930s block on the bottom side of Hampstead on Parliament Hill. Because we have lived around this area for many years, we, and our friends, know several people who live in this block, mostly very happily. And, I know, that it brings me nearest to the house in which John Keates wrote ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, which i read when i was a teenager in Wolverhampton in the heart of the Black Country.

It was a very nice place to live in Keates’ time when the the eighteenth century was coming to terms with the realities of the nineteenth century, when the beacons on Parliament Hill were ready to be lit when Napoleon invaded. It is still a very nice place to live in 2008. Not least because Hampstead Heath is now actually bigger than it was in Keates’ time. And is a mixture of lawns and woodland that beats Hyde Park into a cocked hat.

Nevertheless, i was besieged by advice from my advisers with reasons why I should NOT buy this flat now.

But first, i should report what the estate agent said.

This flat was an Art Deco development with panoramic views over London. True, because although we are on the ground floor, we can see, as Janet noticed when we first went there, that you can acually see the Obelisk.

What I noticed when we first visited is that looming much larger in the near view is the Royal Free Hospital, which is one of the ugliiest modern buildings in the whole of Lonodn. (Although it’s medical care is far above average in the NHS.).

But the avalanche of negative comment I got from the professionals when we put in our offer did not mention the ugliness of the Royal Free, looming large in the foreground of our ‘panoramic’ views over London.

It came from other objections.

First, my surveyor, who told me over the telephone, it is a brick box near an electricity sub-station. To interpret. Our new flat does not have the high ceilings of the Victorian house we lived in around here for 39 years. And, the electricity sub-station, while not a healthy risk, might deter some purchasers.

Next my lawyer, who informed me, along with many queries about the complicated long lease, that my intended property was adjacent to the North London Railway, which might well deter some purchasers. He was quite right, but there are also some people like myself, and, Michael Palin, who actually like living near to railway lines.

The Palin’s and us bought our first small houses around here in 1967 in Oak Village. Michael is still there, having coped with the expansion of his family and his increasing riches, by buying two adjoining houses in Oak Villiage. We moved in 1976 a few hundred yards to a bigger Victorian house on the other side of the Mansfield Road.

But my point is, that my lawyer is quite right to point out that some people will absolutely not want to live by a railway. But, it is equally true, that some people like it!

Finally, my financial adviser told me that i should consider the advantages of going on renting. His advice, I think, was sound. If i wait a year or two, it is likely that I could buy a flat like this more cheaply.

So I don’t think that we have made the best possible property investment by buying our new flat.

But buying a flat or a house in much more than property investment. It is buying a home.

We took possession yesterday in the worst possible conditions. It was pouring with rain. You could barely see the Royal Free Hospital, let alone the Obelisk.

So we had lunch at the Magala pub just down the road. Since we had driven up from Dorset to collect the keys, I wanted to order the full Enlish breakfast. The disk they provided was the 2008 equivalent. I protested, because i could not find the bacon.

But I was wrong. Because, as was pointed out to me, it was there. Not rashers of bacon, but tiny bits smaller than the old English farthing.

But, one of the reasons that I was happy with our new flat, is that I first visited the Magdala, in 1959, when i had a bedsit nearby. It did not serve any food in those days, but it had a healthy custom because, alllegly it had in the wall, a bullet fired from the gun of Ruth Ellis who was the last woman hanged in Britain for murder.

This was a fake. Although, Ruth Ellis did indeed shoot her lover outside the Magdala, the then-pub management faked the bullet hole. And for many years the media substantiated the myth.

But it was in 1959, and still is today, decent pub.

Which is perhaps one of the reasons that I have ignored all the nay-sayers who advised me to think again before i bought this flat.

So to bring this blog back from the personal to the political.

The current crisis requies not only than governments stake their money.

It requires that everyone who can afford it should spend.

Not listen to all the advice that tells them that if they hold off they can buy more chealyl than today.

Have just finished the first one, Birdsong, written by Sebastian Faulks as far back as 1993,  A long time ago. But, no matter. The issues which it deals with are very much alive now. And it is a great novel. Which has some strong things to say about human beings and the things which drive them.

I knew, before I started reading it, that it was about the first world war, which non-Brits may need to be told, means the war between 1914 and 1918 between the Germans under the Kaiser and the Brits, and assorted allies, including the French and at the last stage the Americans.

The first part, in fact is a love story in the year 1910 between a young Brit and the wife of the French bloke whose hospitality he is enjoying. Veyr erotic. But also believable.

But I felt a bit cheated. Not that I did not enjoy the first section. But i had come to this book to learn more about that war. As i read on i got it. What Birdsong tells about that war deserves to be read by all those who did not experience it.

It is a harrowing story. Which is how i described it to an old friend and neighbour earlier this week. He said: ‘i don’t want to read harrowing novels.’

I knew what he meant. Because I have some of the same feelings. But what i did not say to him – and we are both English – was that the harrowing bits were more than compensated for, by the affirmation of what it is to be a human being. I endured the pain, because the Brit who relates the story endured it, and lived on. No to a ‘happy’ life. But to a life.

Birdsong is a work of the imagination. Sebastian Faulks who wrote it, is younger than me, but he was inspired by members of his family, who knew what it was like in the trenches in 1917.

Faulks’ family was the comfortably off middle class. In first wordl war terms, they were he officier class. But what he writes hones in with my memories of my Uncle Bill, who was there in the trenches in 1917.

Bill was working class. And he never talked about that war in my childhood. He was not, in my youth, a role model for the growing youth. He was a hen-pecked husband, dominated by a strong-minded wife. But he was there during my childhood, because he used to stop home on his way back from work to talk to my mother and her children.

And although he was nearly blind because of the gas of 1917 he lived 25 years longer than his wife and longer than my father and mother. Right up until the time he died I tried to get him to tell me what it was acually like in the trenches in 1917.

He never told me, although. over the years,  I had learnt all the tricks that journalists learn to get people to tell them the facts.

But reading the Faulks novel has given me a glimse of the reality he experienced. Faulks, 90 years after these events happened, hais imagined how it was for the people who inhabited that world.

My Uncle Bill would have said he was spot on.

Enough for tonight. This is a tale of two novels.

Next time, you will hear about the second one.

Quite suddenly, in the last few weeks, most of the pundits on both sides of the pond, have started to say that what we are facing now is the worst financial crisis since the Great Crash of 1929, which led to world-wide depression lasting five or six years. In which many people in Britain and America had difficulty in finding enough money for basic necessities, let alone tbe products of consumer capitalism.

This time around the crisis has been in the housing market in both countries. Financial institutions have fuelled the dreams of people’s wishes to buy better houses for themselves, and become capitalists themselves by borrowing money to buy houses to let. Now they are in trouble, because they borrowed more money than they could afford.

And now the property market is plunging. Because people are being charged more for mortgages, if they can get them. And at the same time interest rates are being cut. So the banks (if they have not gone bust) are earing more by a widening gap between the rate at which they borrow and the rate at which they lend.

But some ordinary folk are losing their homes and others, who went in for buying to let, are in severe financial difficulty.

‘Ordinary folk’ for the purposes of this blog, includes pretty well everyone in Britain and America who is not super rich. For them, the purchase of a house is a much bigger spend than anything else in their lifetime. However much they know about finance they cannot regard it just as a property investment. They are buying a home, and for many where the home is, and when they have to buy it, is determined by forces quite outside their control.

Currently I am buying a flat in London to replace our rented flat. In the full knowledge that whatever I pay is likely to be more – maybe much more – than what the flat will sell for in the next two or three years. Maybe more than that. But if I hang around I might be dead before the bottom of the market.

Later on tonight, when I am in bed, the first of the television debates between the Obama and McCain will be taking place. Most of the pundits say that what happens in this first debate often determines the result of the election. Today’s debate is supposed to be about foreign policy.

But the pundits are also saying that American voters are more than ever concerned about the economy. Whatever either candidate says tonight will be said against a background of financial markets in chaos. So voters, and viewers all over the world, will be looking for clues about how well each candidate will do when it comes to managing a financial crisis.

Notsomuch as which candidate is tough and experienced enough to stand up to Putin, Iran or South Korea. But which candidate is asute enough to prevent the stock market panic pushing the world into a long recession.

In my last blog, Brown and out, written as recently as Saturday, I said Labour needed a new leader to have any hope of winning the next election. Today I have to report that the only new leader to emerge at the Labour Party conference in Manchester was a radically changed Gordon Brown. As the political correspondents in the conference hall wrote in today’s newspapers, he did not make a great speech. They rated it good. I rated it very good. When I read the speech in full on the BBC web site. Which was not the impression I got when saw the main BBC News last night, which gave a few sound bites and a lot of commentary.

The most widely quoted sound bite, was when Brown said, that although he was in favour of apprenticeship, this was ‘no time for a novice’ to run the country. In one blow he managed to finger his two main rivals, the youthful David Cameron, who has piloted the Conservative Party to a 20 per cent leader in the polls. And the even more youthful David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, who has been processing around Manchester, professing loyalty to the Prime Minister, but making speeches that leave no doubt in anyone’s mind, that he sees himself as the leader in waiting.

This double-edged barb did far more damage to Miliband than it did to Cameron. Because the television cameras panned to him looking like a giggly callow youth, as the picture here, taken from the BBC web site, demonstrates. And because Miliband had demonstrated during the conference week that he could be just as clumsy as his boss, famous for his ‘clunking fist’ style.

Miliband made some unguarded comments in a lift full of political correspondents including the man from BBC. This how the BBC reported it:

He paid tribute to Mr Brown in his speech but aides were heard telling him it was being given “six out of ten”.

A BBC journalist heard him reply: “I couldn’t have gone any further. It would have been a Heseltine moment.”

As several political journalists pointed out in today’s papers, Michael Heseltine had left the Conservative cabinet before he attacked Margaret Thatcher in his own quite open bid to become leader himself. Miliband is trying to have it both ways, by remaining in the cabinet, declaring his loyalty, while at the same time, making it obvious to all but his advisers, that he is trying to stab him in the back. Witness his article in The Guardian a few weeks ago. And his behaviour this week.

But back to the speeches. Here is a link to Miliband’s main conference speech. See if you can find some substance in it.

By contrast Brown’s speech was full of substance. He talked sense about the chaos in the financial markets and the impending serious recession. He demonstrated his commitment to competition, the free market and private enterprise, continuing the Blairite New Labour policies. But he also stressed the need for government intervention to correct the excesses of the market, and pleadged new measures to help the poor and vulnerable including the growing army of pensioners.

He was rightly criticised in the first year of his premiership for indecisiveness. In this speech he clarity and decisiveness. He offered a clear alternative to Cameron’s New Conservatism. If he continues this way, Britain, like the Americans, will have a clear choice in the next election.

In the last few months I have written several critical blogs about Brown. I don’t regret them. But I do admit I was wrong to write him off. I think he has been changed, by the experience of power and by the tumultuous events of the last few weeks.  From it – to judge by this speech – what is emerging is a new vision. Not the old Labour of Roy Hattersley, Clem Attlee, Nye Bevan and Keir Hardie, but a new new Labour, which seeks to mesh traditional Labour values with the realities of a global economy.

This is only one speech. But a very good one. And the least you can say is that the clunking fist has learnt how to use a stiletto. And the content of the speech demonstrates that although David Miliband looks much more like Barack Obama, that it is Gordon Brown who is articulating policies and a vision that are in tune with the new American Democrats around Obama.

I may have used this headline before. No matter.

Gordon Brown, who stems from Old Labour roots, has since he became Prime Minister, been more Blairite than Tony Blair himself, in allying himself with George W Bush’s America.

In the last few days he has switched around, after reading in the ‘capitalist press’ about the collapse of American consumer capitalism.

He is now switching back to his former agenda of Old Labour, because the Labour vote in the polls has been wiped out by the new MacMilianism of David Cameron. His chances of winning Labour votes are slight. His chances of winning the votes of people who are not Labour are nil.

He is yesterday’s man.

Labour needs a new leader if it is not going to be wiped out in the new election.

It needs someone who is more in tune with with the world as it is, after Bair and after Brown, and, equally important, after George W Bush, who will go back to his ranch on November 4 next.

The time has come for Gordon Brown to join Roy Hattersley in the House of Lords. And to continue to make a contribution by writing for the newspapers.

Will he choose to write for the Murdoch press. (His style is more The Times than The Sun.) or will he compete for a space on The Guardian opinion pages?

Who knows.

But Labour in Manchester needs to be picking a new leader who can have some hope of producing a halfway decent performance in the next election.