Across the pond

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.