Gordon’s one-man show

This will not be a Labour conference. It is Gordon’s one-man show

Fraser Nelson

22 September 2007

Brown will be father of the nation at Bournemouth

His aim is also to stage the most choreographed party conference for years. Just as the Dorset police will check every drain for a bomb, the Prime Minister has been meticulously sweeping the political landscape for any hidden explosive devices. Cabinet members have been sent a blunt message from No. 10: This is Not Your Show. No grandstanding, backbiting or union-baiting. There will be no voting on ‘contemporary motions’, the topics traditionally selected by unions to embarrass Tony Blair. Once, these gestural darts aimed at Blair appealed to Mr Brown’s sense of mischief. Now he will tolerate nothing which threatens his core message from the conference — that Labour is a party united.

The Prime Minister will scarcely need to spell out that this is a pre-election conference, although he will doubtless put his party on a ‘war footing’ in some headline-friendly fashion. Almost all the activists believe this will be their final annual gathering before Labour goes into battle for a fourth term, and will behave accordingly. So expect a sharp contrast from the raucous sectarian battle waged between Blairites and Brownites over the past 13 Labour conferences. Bournemouth will be perfunctory, sedate and lacking in epic tension.

Instead, it will be a gathering to hear a new Brownite gospel. While off the podium, his job in Bournemouth will be to position himself as the party unifier, healer of rifts and burier of hatchets. But he will bring with him a great weapon to quieten any dissent in Labour ranks: an opinion poll lead which, according to the Guardian/ICM survey on Wednesday, puts him a whopping eight points ahead of David Cameron, who emerged as the most unpopular political leader in the same poll. Labour has been waiting almost two years for such a result.

Brown’s speech on Monday will, in effect, be his general election pitch. He will have to unpack his national unity theme, and explain why he considers it ‘new politics’ rather than unprincipled opportunism. We can expect a reprise of his Britishness theme, which is proving a useful device for rising above the Labour party and sucking up Tory votes. There will be his new foreign policy mission (Darfur) and perhaps his own answer to the Conservatives’ ‘broken society’ agenda. And while he’ll find it hard to avoid acknowledging the Northern Rock crisis, he may be able to turn it to his advantage by again claiming to be the man most trusted to deal with financial crisis.