Sugar and spice and ain't I nice?

Well I have just seen our beleagured Prime Minister giving the 'speech of his life' - or so some of the Labour faithful in the conference hall defined it - and I am left singularly unimpressed. It is almost impossible to see the man who appeared such a lion in the Commons when dealing with financial detail as Chancellor as the same guy who stands there on the podium spouting platitudes and grinning at every obligatory round of applause like a kid begging for approval on speech day.





I was hoping for a gritty speech which would open the eyes of doubters and show us a Gordon Brown who realised the image he had to dispel, and who would give us solid reasons to believe he was the man to lead Britain for another six years, dispatching his Tory and Labour critics alike.

Instead we got a mixture of schmaltz - which as done by Brown is excruciating - and appeals to our national loyalties - 'putting Britain first', 'I love MY country', 'I am proud to serve...' .....yeah yeah Gordon but you are in a hole. How are you going to dig yourself out?

Well in truth he didn't have a clue. In fact Brown has no Plan B. he can only deliver one type of speech and the only difference is the degree of passion he can summon to deliver it. There was a paucity of detail and a lot of sound bytes - something he said he scorned. There was some policy of a sort - but more the sort of scraps you throw to the dog. He promised that all cancer patients would now have free prescriptions. Well great but, although cancer is an emotive topic, there are other patients with long term illnesses who will feel slighted, not to mention that Scotland and Wales in this 'United Kingdom' of which Brown boasted so proudly, get free prescriptions anyway.

He talked of going to America and re-planning the global financial system - rather a grandiose claim which I fear he will not be able to live up to and which his critics will seize upon.

He attacked the Tories for not having policies to suit the current grave financial situation while never being able to shed the responsibility for being the steward of that situation in Britain for the last eleven years. It seems ridiculous to continue talking of being the architect of change when your government has been in power since 1997.

Basically he made, in my opinion, a fundamental mistake. He talked, in a mock modest style, of the situation being about 'you, the party and not me' Wrong Gordon. It was all about you. The Labour Party has been in power since 1997. We know what its priorities are. We know, for good or bad, how much dogma it has sacrificed and what it now believes in. What we needed was some clear sign that the man at the helm of that party could not only steer the country through the immediate troubled waters but had enough going for him to destroy his critics in the country and win the next General Election.

I was simply not convinced one iota by what I heard. It wasn't a bad Gordon Brown speech but then it hadn't a great deal to live up to. I think the Tories will be sharpened by the fact that he at least gave some areas of policy on which he believes Labour has the answers, old chestnuts though they were. But it seems that Gordon cannot rise to peaks. He has a plateau as a speaker and he has reached it. He is a doer. Nothing wrong with that but right now he needs to be a motivator and he simply is not.

I don't expect Labour fortunes to change much as a result of this keynote speech and, although it will give Gordon some breathing space, I think the gremlins will soon be back to haunt him.

I'll be prepared to wager now that someone else will be leading the Labour Party come the next General Election in 2010. Maybe Labour has another 12 months to decide whether to ditch their leader or not in order for a newcomer to get some mileage out of the job before facing the electorate. But I'll be very surprised if it's Brown's face shining down from those election posters come 2010.