Don't mention the war
- 24 Sep 06, 06:57 PM
I'm in God's own city. That's Manchester to you. You'll have to forgive this north-west boy's local pride.
The watchword here is Basil Fawlty's "don't mention the war". The war in question is, of course, the war over the succession. One minister greeted me with a prediction that we're in for a week of "mush and gush". Blair-ites, Brown-ites and anybodyelse-ites share a desire to maintain the political ceasefire.
Tony Blair, as ever, put it better than anyone else (watch the interview here) when he said that Labour had gone AWOL from the British public and had to show this week that they'd learnt their lesson.
This injunction will succeed, I suspect - but only up to a point. There'll be no stopping people talking about the leadership - indeed, the foreign secretary backed Gordon Brown within minutes of the PM saying that the Cabinet had all agreed not to talk about the leadership issue. However, most will try to do so in a calm and civilised way.
There's one or two "buts" to add to that prediction though:
"But 1" is that, like the little boy in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, someone at this huge gathering may not have cottoned on to what they're supposed to think and say.
"But 2" is that the real conference takes place not on the stage but late (very late) at night in the bars here - and alcohol and weariness have a way of making people forget their inhibitions.
After all, who imagined that Walter Wolfgang would steal the show last time.
PS: This is not, by the way, the first conference Labour has held in Manchester. It's the third. The Labour Representation Committee - the forerunner of the party - held the first here just a century ago - it lasted one day. The second was in January 1917, in Manchester's Albert Hall during the First World War.
