Saturday 6th October

Party conferences are now such stage managed show pieces that they are almost not worth watching. Time was when there would be real controversy, with delegates arguing furiously, disagreeing with the executive, criticizing their own Government, voting against official policy and other misdemeanors.

It is now almost all about presenting the leader in the best light possible, glossing over the divisions and mistakes, presenting a roll-call of successes that are fanatically applauded by the bussed-in minions.

I attended two Labour conferences in the late seventies.  An uninformed observer would never have guessed that Callaghan and Healey up on the stage were actually running the country as they were ritually torn apart.  Of course those were the bad old days of real passion.  Who nowadays can really get excited by academy schools, or who is going to cut faster and further than the other.

So far we have had Nick Clegg with his maybe misfiring Apology and Ed Milliband with his One Nation Labour Party re-branding (a bit like Compassionate Conservatism without the blue tinge) exercise.  Surprisingly Milliband seems to have pulled off a bit of a coup, almost all observers have declared it was an excellent speech, and if it did no more than re-energise his own party it would have been a success, but it may just have reached a few Labour voters who deserted the party last time and may now come back.

David Cameron has maybe a much harder job to do.  He has to appease the right wing of his party who hate his dalliance with Clegg, while not upsetting those in the centre.  He has to try to turn what has been by almost universal acceptance a pretty poor last six months shambles into some sort of success.  He has to show us that even though the cuts are beginning to bite and will only get worse and that the wretched deficit is still yawningly wide it will all soon be worth it.  He has to defend the internal contradiction of ‘We are all in it together’ with the new 45p tax rate.  And he has to make us believe that he ‘Dave’ (not that old-Etonian toff) is the bloke to vote for next time.  A pretty tough task – let’s see how he does.