Michael White reports from Labour's Bournemouth conference, where strong divisions persist on the wisdom of an early election and rumours surface of another Tory defection
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Breakfast, Queens Hotel: The right set of newspapers lands on the mat today, including the Daily Mail which I have read for nearly 40 years - and have the blood pressure pills to prove it.
There is more disturbing page on news for Gordon Brown: the Mail is on his side. ''Women voters turn to Brown'' is the paper's charitable gloss on the latest YouGov poll for Channel 4 News, though that interpretation strikes me as more akin to what the Mail would - in other circumstances - call ''a sexual act".' They do so hate Cameron.
The news is printed below that grainy, indistinct photo which is said to be Madeleine McCann in Morocco. Yeah, right. I feel the same way about the pressure building on Mr Brown to stage what has suddenly turned into a November election. Call that an election scenario? It's just too grainy and indistinct to be credible.
Reviewing last night I can report that Labour MPs remain divided. Tessa Jowell, whom I meet in the street, is keen on an election. So, I learn, is David Miliband. I encounter Ken Livingstone who is - if I remember it right - a sceptic.
Ken is more excited by the discovery that Boris Johnson's arrival as potential Tory challenger has improved his own ratings. I say that Boris has proved pretty hapless on the stump (I attended a hustings) and may not even be nominated - despite the glitz and Cameroon pressure.
At the traditional Irish embassy bash Dennis Skinner favours an early election, though he knocks on the head the day's conference rumour that a quick poll would allow Labour to fight on the old election boundaries, at least in England.
Since the new boundaries would cost Labour a dozen seats or more without vote being cast - by adjusting boundaries to reflect population change - that's important. Before the last election John Curtice, the academic polling analyst, said that 600,000 Tory voters had moved into more rural Tory areas where their votes piled up - wasted.
Dennis Skinner is actually more euphoric about the backstairs deals at the conference to head off closure or merger of 42 Remploy factories.
Remploy workers, whose numbers include some severely disabled people, have been protesting outside the conference and are poised to strike. Embarrassing for a Labour government and Peter Hain, the new work and pensions secretary, has been persuaded to change policy which will allow government contracts to be reserved for Remploy.
''Just like the old days,'' says Dennis with glee, though he has always been a realist about the need for Labour to adapt to changing times. He does not subscribe to the romantic ''party of protest'' perspective. Power is better.
On Tuesday night my main task, a favour, was to chair a Q&A session for delegates with Alastair Campbell about his book (all proceeds, including the £10 ticket price, to Labour coffers).
Alastair and I have never been mates and have disagreed on many things over the years. But I rate him higher than I do many of his many detractors.
What I cannot tell in advance is whether the 250-strong paying audience will be hostile to Tony Blair's spinmeister, who is disliked by Labour activists who also dislike his old boss (1994-2003), or supportive?
In the event they are respectful, even kind and it is left to me to try and interject one or two awkward questions.
No shock revelations, though he tells one perfect little tale about Blair who was an even greater technophobe than Alastair himself. I once heard the then-PM tell one of my work experience students ''This job makes you incompetent, they do everything for you.''
Campbell learned to text three years ago and loves it. Blair is still learning. Alastair has kept his first faltering efforts. The first said ''Are.'' The next said: ''This is amazing, you can do words and everything.''
Alastair shares my hostility to an early election. After a day or two people would start to ask: ''Why?''
Today I woke early, read 20 more pages of The Brothers Karamazov (we now have the jury's verdict) and then went for a swim, leaving the brothers behind because none of them had remembered to bring their costume.
The sun was warm, but the sea was even colder than Brighton last week. The awful summer has made a difference to September's water. I lasted barely five minutes.
Midday: Ken Livingstone has just made his own pre-election conference speech as mayor of London. At least we know he's certain to be going to the polls next May. The hall is packed, even the security staff pop in to listen to this compelling mix of municipal politicking and the Big Picture which Ken has always managed.
Except that he's matured over his long political career, made his compromises but kept his essential self, the newt-loving troublemaker whose skills include a self of mischief. It is grown-up stuff, well beyond Boris Johnson's range.
Right at the end he cites as an achievement the new statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square - unveiled by the great man himself with ''a Labour mayor and a Labour prime minister'' at his side, as the self-same Labour mayor puts it.
It's a bit corny, but Ken is quick to link Mandela's nobility of purpose with Aung San Suu Kyi and to remark that his policies on buses and tube trains are modest in comparison with their heroic struggles. The conference, which is short of star material, gives him a warm standing ovation.
His old enemy, G Brown, rises to embrace him. Cheeky Ken grabs his chance and raises Gordon's hand aloft. Shameless, but welcome theatre!
In the old days the conference bars would be thick with smoke and piled high with empty pint glasses by midday. Now the smokers are outside and the pints are heavily outnumbered by coffee and bottled water - though there is a stall on west door selling appetising burgers, chips and heart attacks.
Guardian photographer, Martin Argles, reports that fellow snappers took him to a pub last night where customers can buy vibrators from a slot machine. Yours for a tenner. Such is the instant gratification society which Gordon Brown probably blames on Old What's His Name.
''What a difference a year can make,'' joke Brownites, some of whom were Blairites 12 months ago.
Not that everyone has signed the pledge. Two sweet young students working in the De Vere lounge of the posh Royal Bath were astonished by the behaviour of journalists at Tesco's media reception on Sunday night.
''They drank 700 bottles of champagne as if it was rice and water, I've never seen anything like it,'' one later told me. The lads even tried the ''Can I take a bottle for my friend?'' routine on the impressionable young pair. Alas, I was unaware of this particular orgy and therefore failed to make it 701.
1pm For the second day the drama unfolding in Burma dominates the news headlines, as the fall of Milosovic in Belgrade once wiped out a Tory party conference. But Labour has had a good run this week and I hear few complaints: good luck to the Burmese. Am I the last to hear that the BBC's Nick Robinson dismiss election fever as ''tosh'' on TV this week? Delegates and fellow-hacks are whispering ''tosh'' as they pass him.
My colleague, Simon Hoggart, signed a desultory few copies of his new collection of parliamentary sketches at the Bournemouth branch of Borders bookshop earlier this week. He managed to persuade staff to put his book higher on display than Alastair Campbell's The Blair Years - though still lower than the memoirs of ex-MP Oona King.
''Campbell is coming in tomorrow, he'll get it changed again,'' Simon predicts gloomily. Sure enough, when I visit Borders to buy a birthday card, The Blair Years sit higher than Hoggart or King.
I am amazed at the number of delegates queuing to get his signature on copies of the book after our talk. Using his new texting skills he later tells me: "Sold Out Twice Today: No Jokes please.'' What can he mean?
There have been few Brown photo opportunities to keep the snappers away from vibrator purchase. The prime minister's wife, Sarah, provided one yesterday, but apparently had six party minders. Mr Brown can often be seen on the conference platform of all places, in full public gaze. Oddly enough, the snappers do not seem to mind.
I bump into an old colleague, now a successful lobbyist working in what they call public affairs, the interface between government, commerce and the voluntary sector.
She and her team have to wear blue conference passes (staff are red, delegates orange, media green etc) and are routinely barred from harmless events because they are ''commercial.''
Old Labour instincts die hard. ''We are the Great Loathed,'' she explains.
2pm: Returning to my desk from a trawl around the conference I find two polling emails. Mark Hanson directs me to www.labourhome.org/ where party activists are allegedly eager for an election. Thus:
Q1 - Should GB call election now?
62% yes, 38% no
Q2 - When do you expect?
34% now, 66% May 08
Q3 - Are we ready to fight election?
56% yes, 44% no
Q4 - Do you feel more able to campaign since GB became PM?
66% yes, 34% no.
Unmoved by that, I find the other is from Sir Bob Worcester, founding father of the Mori polling organisation.
Bob is uncharacteristically grumpy that the political reporters have got over-excited about Channel 4 News's YouGov poll which put Labour 11 points ahead. He says it barely differs from Ipsos Mori's earlier findings for the Sun. Thus:
YouGov
Con:33%
Lab: 44%
Lib Dem:13%
Lead: 10% +11 (after Brown's speech, for Channel 4)
Ipsos MORI
Con 34%
Lab 42%
Lib Dem 14%
Lead: 10% + 8 (before Brown's speech, for the Sun)
In other words the Tories are on 33.5% (+/- 0.5%), Labour on 43.0% (+/- 1.0%) , says Bob whose much-ignored advice is ''watch the share, not the lead ...There is no statistically significant difference, even at the 99% level, in the share of vote between the parties, any of them, between the two sets of poll findings.
Why oh why do the media work themselves up in such a lather when there is no evidence for all the fuss they are making?''
All of which is interesting, though so is the news from my old friend, Ian Mackenzie, a sometime Labour apparatchik. When he heard the Ladbrokes had closed their book on bets on a 2007 election, he dashed down to the Bournemouth branch to put £150 on 2009 - sensible chap. Only to be told they weren't taking bets on 2007 either. ''Surely they can't have it both ways,'' says Ian.
6.30 p.m: Opinions differ as to how successful was the prime minister's Q&A session with TV star, Mariella Frostrup. Some thought he actually relaxed, others that he was earnest but dull. I thought he was a bit of both and generated at least two stories: action promised on Burma and (unrelated) private equity tax regimes.
He could certainly find a new joke about Richard Nixon's visit to Ghana's independence celebrations in 1957. ''How does it feel to be free?'' the US Veep asked people. ''How should I know, I come from Alabama,'' replied someone. In fairness, plenty of delegates appear not to have heard it, though Brown buffs have - often.
Should a BBC person like Mariella (the object of sexist hoots when she appeared) have been on such a platform, grumps asked each other? The Mail will adjudicate in the morning.
Channel 4 News is promising a scoop. Apparently an A-List Tory candidate in 2005, one Judith Syme, who got Labour's majority down to 2,700 in trendy Brighton Kemptown, has jumped ship after failing to get the nomination in Poplar and Limehouse. At least, that is what my doughty colleague, David Hencke, tells me and he has a shelf-full of awards.
Tony Blair's former first flatmate, Lord Charlie Falconer, now admits to being so Old Labour that he didn't realise that New Labour Mark II has switched the leader's conference speech from Tuesday afternoon to Monday afternoon. Lord Falconer turned up in Bournemouth to discover it was all over. He spent Monday afternoon in Brussels talking about the law to Norwegians.
Hold the cross-media front page. David Miliband, whose ministerial blog at Defra was a progressive joy to environmentalists, is set to launch his own blog at the foreign office.
Lord Palmerston, who was keener on gunboats than David seems to be, must be spinning in his carbon-neutral grave. Ambassadors are also going to be unleashed on the blogsphere. Has no one warned them of the prolix perils of over-relaxed blogging after too many Ferraro Rocher chocs?
* Read Michael White's blogposts from yesterday, Monday and Sunday.
