And so I stagger into the final day of the Conservative conference, and the 2007 conference season, eager to hear David Cameron. Will Dave pull off the big one. By God, I think he has. But watching it at home on TV my wife thinks otherwise. TV counts.
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Carlton Hotel, 9am
Radio 4's John Humphrys has just mediated a Today programme spat between Tory defence spokesman Dr Liam Fox and army minister Bob Ainsworth over whether GB's Iraq trip is mere spin, snubbing parliament and playing politics with soldiers' lives.
Ainsworth is usually one of Labour's solid sergeant majors, but sounds uncomfortable. He is lucky to be up against Fox, who can be relied on to overstate his case. But it strikes me as a bad omen for an election.
Over breakfast the Guardian team discusses the disciplined silence of the Tory right during the Blackpool conference. They are here all right, attending fringe meetings, holding jolly dinners, plotting what they'll do when Dave is reduced to toast by the Brown machine.
Like the hard left they see the real enemy as being within their own party, the pinkos, the centrists, the "Fabians" - a word deployed here - who are half-hearted about tax cuts and standing up for the national interest.
Thatcherites like (Lord) Michael Forsyth, MPs Edward Leigh, Michael Fallon and Julian Lewis, they still hanker after the good old days even as they pick through the rubble and abuse herbivorous moderates like Phil Hammond over dinner.
For myself, I argued that when Dave published John Redwood's deregulation package in August he was burying it in the holiday season, not lurching to the right. Redwood has been under wraps here this week.
The right's problem is that it doesn't have a candidate except David Davis, for whom there is little enthusiasm. Is his absence from frenetic fringe meetings in Blackpool proof of loyalty, discreet disloyalty or merely of idleness, a charge levelled in the past?
In an interview for Guardian Unlimited he tells me that Gordon Brown can't seriously want to fight an election on immigration, violent crime or prisons - "unless he's started believing his own propaganda."
Last night I took part in another Tory fringe meeting, standing in for ruggedly handsome Liam Halligan of the Sunday Telegraph. It's arranged by Dr Sheila Lawlor, who runs a family and a university job at Cambridge, plus a small rightwing thinktank, up a five floor walk-up in London's Charing Cross Road.
It's called Politeia which is as daft a name as Amicus or Hostes, much used by amalgamating trade unions. But everyone seems to like Sheila. I sometimes attend her seminars, where the guest speaker is usually better than the food and wine on offer. So I owe Sheila when she rings at the last minute.
I am meant to discuss energy security with the aforementioned Liam Fox, a subject on which my knowledge is postage stamp size, I explain. Liam gives a nod to diversity of supply, to sustainability too, but really wants to talk about security and the need to stand up to the Russian bear.
When my time comes I say I too believe in diversity and would like both the nuclear and wind/water lobbies to provide lay people with more convincing answers to problems of cost, viability, etc., ready for when fossil fuels run out. Why is it that the green lobby has never met a real windmill it actually likes, let alone a Severn Barrage, which has them fighting like rats in a biodegradable sack?
I also say that the room in which we are all sweating at the Savoy Hotel is far too hot on a warm autumn evening and we seem to be trying to heat the neighbourhood (as my old dad would have said). So we could start by switching the radiator off.
Where my luck holds is in trying to see Russia's present conduct from a Russian point of view: beaten in the Cold War, dismembered, its rich energy resources looted by the oligarchs to buy Premiership football clubs and encircled by Nato, the EU and China, it's not hard why it is trying to reassert itself, however clumsily under Vlad.
To my surprise the audience tends towards my perspective and is critical of Fox's anti-Putin jibes, though some people seem to think the EU a greater threat - which is clearly daft.
Why so? Because this is an industry audience, not an ideological one. It's interested in Russia as a reality, not a political football. Quite unlike many audiences here, but the kind of surprise fringe meetings can produce at party conferences. I end up quoting (I think) Lord Salisbury, Queen Victoria's last Tory PM: Russia is always too weak and too strong.
Winter Gardens, 11am
The last day of the last conference of the season. Good, though we will miss the excellent Carlton Hotel's full cholesterol breakfast, the best of the season, when we return to dull reality, muesli and fruit, for the next 49 weeks at home. Outside the weather has got colder and greyer, but still no rain this week, a Lancashire miracle unlikely to last until November 1 or 8.
The conference programme judders on manfully, but everyone is waiting for the Cameron speech. Can Dave united his party, impress on the country that he is in charge, not the red-nosed arm chair colonels of Fleet Street and the thinktanks? Can he do well enough to frighten GB back into his senses?
11.30am
George Osborne has been complaining that Labour misused civil service time in rebutting his plan to tax wealthier non-domiciled people £25,000 a head for living here: he grossly over-stated their number, Labour said.
An old party hack-and-chum emails to remind me that John Major's government did exactly the same at the Treasury in 1996. No that it did Mr Major much good, I feel obliged to point out.
12.30 pm: Here in the Blog Which Hears The News Last we pick up rumours that Dave's strategists will play on the old ''psychologically flawed'' jibe against Gordon Brown if he pushes the starter button.
On what evidence? Dapper Alan Duncan called him ''weird'' on the conference fringe last night and Mr Cameron himself was heard by the Daily Record's James Lyons at the Scottish reception saying he couldn't get into Mr Brown's mind - ''I'm not a psychotherapist.'' An election called in current circumstances may give tail wind to such talk.
I appear again on The Daily Politics with Andrew Neil whose hair, I can confirm, is in tiptop shape to fight an election in whatever weather conditions Mother Nature cares to throw at it in the weeks ahead. Do your worst, Mother, it will not leak - or even discolour.
Matthew D'Ancona, teen wunderkind who edits The Spectator, and I agree with Andrew that Dave has to play a blinder in his speech later today if he is to derail Gordon's election train. Matthew reveals ( at least he does to me and whoever is watching, surely several people) that Mr Cameron is going to learn his speech by heart - more or less - then improvise it.
Risky, but potentially impressive. I say I will be happy as long as Mr Cameron keeps all his clothes on. You can never tell with the upper classes on live TV nowadays.
4.00 pm: David Cameron seems to have pulled it off. The crowd in the Empress Ballroom listened attentively rather than euphorically to his hour-long semi-improvisation, cheering him wildly at only three points.
• when he accused ministers of reneging on the military covenant which promises to look after the armed forces;
• when he refused to apologise for the ''fantastic school'' he attended, though he didn't mention Eton by name;
• when he told Gordon Brown to ''go ahead and call that election.''
But the audience gave him - and Samantha Cameron in a good outfit - a generous send-off before dashing for the station and the M6 that Tory MPs I spoke to were pleased, in some cases relieved.
What new lines were there in it? There is, as yet, no text for us to check. Across the board it sounded like a resume of the week's announcements. What struck me was Cameron's highly effective use of anecdote: about doctors, soldiers, families, teachers, teenage gunmen on bicycles in Liverpool.
Above all, the way he used the story of the two CSOs who stood by while that boy drowned in a pool last month: they stuck to a state rule book instead of doing the right thing. ''Tear up the rule book,'' he said. Devastating.
Trite, counters my wife who had watched it all on TV at home on my suggestion., Disappointing. Boring. Lightweight. She and her girlfriend switched it off and went for a walk. In the hall it felt much better and instant pundits are saying it is ''the best speech here in 15 years'' - which is pompous, but sounds terrific. But the TV reaction matters most, especially among the older generation: the one that bothers to vote.
Will it provoke Mr Brown into seizing his moment? Or give him sufficient cause to pause and retreat from the election he has set in train. Post-Cameron polls this weekend will decide it. As I type hastily and head for the train, I hear George Osborne spinning it like a top on TV behind me. Goodbye old politics, welcome to the new politics.
