Michael White takes the pulse of the Labour conference on the morning after Gordon Brown's big speech and finds it beating... slowly, but with determination not to be distracted by election talk
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Breakfast, Queens Hotel: The front desk has delivered the Sun to my door instead of the Guardian (they later blame my handwriting), so Gordon Brown's post-speech standing takes an early knock, despite the bright Brown sunshine over Bournemouth.
Why so? Because the Sun has decided to treat the new prime minister's conference speech as a test of his commitment to the Sun's agenda on Europe. ''Not His Finest Hour'' thunders its Churchillian headline over a Grumpy Gordon photo and a report which complains that he devoted only 12 seconds of his hour-long speech to the EU.
None of those seconds was devoted to promising a referendum on the reform treaty, so the Sun lets rip. It has a battlebus, a petition signed by a less-than-staggering 5,000 people and some poor soul dressed up as Winston on the beach here ( Fight 'em on the beaches - geddit?).
Yesterday it devoted a slightly barmy fives pages to the topic, allowing its rivals to make better use of its own poll, the one that gave Brown an eight-point lead.
Behind this lies a row at the Sun's Sunday night dinner with David Miliband. It's the sort of thing some newspapers do at conference time, putting dinner inside a minister in return for a chat and, with luck, a story.
Team Sun's dinner went pear-shaped because my old colleague, ex-political editor turned pundit Trevor Kavanagh, attacked the foreign secretary for being feeble on the referendum issue. Miliband eventually got out his chainsaw.
Apparently it culminated in him thanking Trevor for pushing the Tories so far to the right on Europe that they are less likely to win an election. Not what matey dinners are supposed to be about. An irony really, Trevor has had to endure Murdoch's New Labour line for a decade now with still no end of the purgatory in sight.
9.30am: The conference centre is still quiet because both Labour and Tory sessions - not like those keen Lib Dems - start later. Today there are no ''policy seminars'' until 10.45am. In the old days they started at nine regardless of whether delegates were fit to drive.
I certainly was. After Brown's big speech I went to a Chinese restaurant with Guardian colleagues and management big cheeses from the paper who were down for the annual Guardian conference party.
When Polly Toynbee joined our table the editor moved from my side to sit next to her. What had I done wrong? Not enough policy details? Not enough jokes? Will my pension be docked?
Polly and I met up again at the Guardian party and discuss the election with Philip (Lord) Gould, the Labour pollster who has also arrived early at the bash in the Highcliffe Hotel.
He thinks Brown should stage an October election - ''I would'' - but is not sure he actually will.
I say I can see the party interest in doing so, but can't spot the national interest. One disaster, a failed bank or the Queen catching bluetongue disease, and it could all rebound.
He says the Tories have made a hash of things and it's their own fault. I say, remember 1970 when Harold Wilson dashed and lost.
Later a Labour MP who definitely doesn't want to be quoted asks a good question: did Gordon actually use the word ''Labour'' in the speech? The answer is yes, several times, but not much.
Feeling tired, I leave just as the Browns and other Labour bigwigs are arriving, possibly from the Telegraph party in the Tralee across the street.
Labour has a big tent party policy. Charles Clarke is not present. Martin Kettle tells me he arrived in Bournemouth at 2pm. And left four hours later.
The party goes on until well after midnight. But I am tucked up in bed with The Brothers Karamazov, all three of them. I have been reading Dostoyevsky's strange, compelling and long novel for weeks, so the brothers have been on the conference trail with me.
Last week we had a quiet fish and chip supper in Brighton, just the four of us, and I read 100 pages. Last night I fell asleep one page into the prosecutor's closing speech, almost as long as Gordon and just as short of jokes. Fifty pages to go and the plot remains compelling.
10am I meet Glenys Kinnock MEP having a coffee, someone I have known for years. I saw her daughter, Rachel, now a mother-of-two, on Monday night.
Brown's generous reference to Neil Kinnock in his speech - reinforced by a knowing nod in his direction in the hall - was enough to make the emotional Kinnock shed a tear.
Tony made such references too, didn't he? Yes, replies Mrs Kinnock, who is less prone to tears, but only because he knew he had to. She is wearing a bright red jacket to make it easier to catch the chairman's eye during the Darfur debate.
A good pro's trick, but she has been out from under Neil's shadow - was she ever under it? - as an MEP for 13 years now.
12.00 noon: There is a distinct sense of anti-climax here because the annual Labour leader's speech took place earlier than ever, on Monday, not Tuesday. There are procedural reasons for this, it is technically a report on behalf of the parliamentary party. But it always seems more sensible to me to keep it to the final day - as the Lib Dems and Tories do.
What keeps this conference energised is speculation about a possible election. ''Every conference only has one question. Last week it was 'Is Ming up to it?' This week it's the election, next week it will be ' Who's in charge?''' says John McTearnan, the No 10 aide involved in the loans-for-honours probe, now working for Des Browne.
I have rarely found an issue so divisive. People one has known for 20 years take the view you don't expect them to. Scots tell you an October election will cost Labour seats, other Scots say the opposite.
Andrew Dismore (Hendon) and Chris Mullin ( Sunderland South) mutter in a corner, agreed that working class voters tend to vote less in bad weather and that the election ramp is driven by people who ''don't knock on doors much.''
12.45 pm: I bump into Ed Miliband, 37-year-old cabinet new boy, and notice that his dark hair is developing flecks of white and one white patch. Excellent. White hair will give him gravitas, I assure him. Mr Miliband seems unpersuaded.
2.00 p.m : Idle speculation does not mean the conference is ignoring policy. These events are generally less passionate and less angry before, it's more of a conversation, but no less heart-felt.
During the Q&A session for Alan Johnson's health team a woman protests that adolescents with mental illnesses should not simply be dumped on adult wards at 18. ''I know this because my daughter has just died because of this,'' she explains. Ann Keen, junior health minister, offers a private chat.
If that isn't bad enough, when the debate turns to foreign policy David Miliband (41), whose hair started going grey much sooner than Brother Ed's is preceded to the podium by Ikhlass Mohamed, a Darfuri woman who tells a tale of savagery against African tribes by Arabs, all of them Sudanese, and does so with calm dignity.
Yet when I go up the hill to chair a lunch-time fringe meeting I encounter inhumanity of a different kind, lesser but still shocking. The meeting, run by Age Concern and the regulatory Healthcare Commission, is about the need for more dignified treatment of the old.
Gordon Lishman, a 30 year veteran of Age Concern, tells a dreadful story about a doctor asking nurses on the ward to clean up the bed of an old man whose colostomy bag has burst. It is finally done only after 5 such requests at the end of the day. Lishman checked this shocker - and was told it is common.
Ivan Lewis, the minister, who used to work in the voluntary sector, replied that NHS staff are under a lot of pressure but that there is no excuse for this. ''Some things are not about resources.'' But how can people be so unkind?
2.30 p.m: I have missed the Guardian's lunchtime fringe meeting, chaired by Polly Toynbee. But my colleague, Will Woodward, reports that Miliband senior fretted about the Top Trump cards being circulated around the conferences by Sky TV.
The cards are said to judge political skills of top MPs, fairly crudely, I should add ( I was a judge), and David reports to the meeting that Brother Ed beats him in several categories - but that George Osborne beat both of them in all.
This view is not typical of this conference where young George is widely dismissed as a twerp and therefore a Labour asset. Not sure that's right, but I'm not sure an October election is right either.
4.00 p.m. :Talking of brothers, I am reminded by erudite sources, top sources, of course, that there are arguably four Brothers Karamazov if we include the bastard half-brother, Smerdyakov. Not having quite finished the book I am not sure how important that assertion - inconclusively made several hundred pages back - will prove. I will let you know.
