Labour conference 2009: Gordon Brown is Labour's hero now

Peter Mandelson gave him his orders yesterday – enough of what you’ve done, tell us what you’ll do – and today Gordon Brown obeyed. By his dire standards it has to be judged a success, even if the rhetoric was for the most part typically clunky. With rumours persisting that he might yet be forced out before polling day, he needed to give his party a clear reason to swing behind him and let him lead Labour to the polls. He did just that, with a draft manifesto of fourth term policies and an emotional lift from his wife Sarah – who provided tomorrow’s ‘my hero’ headlines. It will take a crowbar to move him now.

There is plenty to pick apart, of course. His new-found fondness for the middle classes, which he tried to explain by expanding them to include the working class and just about everyone else into the squeezed middle, rings false. To say he stands with those who are “sick and tired” of crime and anti-social behaviour is too much to believe from someone who never showed an interest in the issue as Chancellor, save to sabotage Tony Blair’s attempts to take benefit off truanting children in 2002. Ask any passing former Home Secretary and they will tell you that Mr Brown was uninterested in anti-social behaviour, until now.

His policy proposals will also merit the closest of scrutiny, not least for their affordability. A speech that said nothing about public spending restraint was packed full of ways to increase the call on the public purse. He hopes instead that out there people will nod their heads at the idea of taking the nation’s 50,000 most troublemaking families under some sort of state supervision, and teenage mums into care.

But first and foremost this was a speech for Labour, not the nation. It was about reviving morale that just days ago Alistair Darling said was on its knees (was that part of the plan I wonder?). It was about buying off sections of the party with offers of more cash for schools, an even bigger NHS, the abolition of hereditary peers and – one for the afficionados, this – a referendum on proportional representation. Activists who were in despair now have something to fight for, even if they must know it will be in vain. It was a necessary piece of political business, and even had a few good lines. Peter Mandelson looked particularly pleased.