Labour Party Conference: Margaret Jay's just-fancy-that guide to cliches and platitudes

BY GENERAL agreement Gordon Brown's speech to the conference was something of a triumph, an upward surge for party morale. Then again, almost anything might have felt uplifting after the pedestrian pieties of Baroness Jay of Paddington's address on the subject of "Women", which immediately preceded him. "At 51 per cent of the population women are truly the many and not the few," she announced; one of the more thrilling passages of her speech. Delegates applauded approvingly - yes, even Mother Nature was on message now. And it needn't stop there. "We have started down the road but we still have a long way to go," she continued, making a late withdrawal from Millbank's Approved Cliche and Metaphor Bank. Was Baroness Jay going to unveil another Labour target? Women to become 57 per cent of the population by 2003?

By now, though, Gordon Brown had arrived on the rostrum and every eye was bent on interpreting the exact shape and dimensions of the gap between him and the Prime Minister. How amicable was the inclination of their torsos, how relaxed their shoulders, how often did their eyelines cross in a gaze of reciprocal respect? Both men were smiling with a deranged resolution, determined to thwart the photographers who had clumped at their feet, as if taking station at a particularly hazardous bend on a Formula One race circuit. The snappers were waiting for a crash - that decisive moment when facial muscles would have to be briefly relaxed to prevent cramp and they might capture an expression ambiguous enough to be presented as contempt or coldness. You could tell when they thought they were close from the surging flicker of flashbulbs - a visible register of journalistic hope. As he waited for his cue Mr Brown stroked his forelock tenderly - like a vet trying to soothe a distressed animal.

The Chancellor's project was clear from his first sentence - to get the party looking forward again, rather than looking back in mild disappointment. It was a speech that contained few concrete promises and yet was everywhere pervaded by promise - that delirious sense of possibility that followed the last election and which has steadily leaked away ever since. "We have only just begun," said Mr Brown, not just once but four times, and it was the phrase on which he closed, after a peroration that would not have disgraced a revivalist preacher. Today might be bearable - Mr Brown had begun with a proud summary of achievements intended to rebuke Labour doubters - but, he implied, it was tomorrow that should be the Labour Party's permanent address.

There was something unpalatable buried at the heart of this crowd-pleaser - bracketed between the crusading sermon and the deft Tory-bashing ("Hague, Widdecombe, Redwood and Maude", said Mr Brown witheringly, as if the names were charge, evidence and verdict in one). But he even managed to slip that in relatively painlessly. "We will not spend money we have not earned," he declared, and the hall slumped a little, knowing it was time to take the medicine. "We will never again let Tory economics ruin people's lives!" Like the quick smack that masks the sting of the hypodermic needle, the hostile exclamation prodded a distracting reflex of applause from the delegates. It was an impressive sleight of hand; a Chancellor who had locked himself to Tory spending plans for the past two years somehow managing to suggest that it would be reactionary to spend more on public services.

The Prime Minister liked some bits more than others. His smile stiffened during one sustained passage of applause, as though Mr Brown was doing a little bit too well for comfort, and he gave a tiny flinch when the Chancellor used the word "socialist", but I think his grin at the end was the real thing. He, more than most of those present, needs a break from the unforgiving present tense and for 40 minutes Mr Brown had taken us all back to the future.