Portrait of the week | 4 October 2003

Mr Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, made a speech at the Labour party conference that pointedly made reference to ‘Labour’ 20 times and never to ‘New Labour’; the party needed ‘not just a programme but a soul’. His performance was seen as a move to succeed Mr Tony Blair as Prime Minister. In his own speech, Mr Blair held out the prospect of a third Labour term. ‘I can only go one way. I’ve not got a reverse gear,’ he said. ‘After six years, more battered without, but stronger within. It’s the only leadership I can offer.’ Earlier, asked in a television interview whether he would have done anything differently in going to war against Iraq, he said: ‘Nothing. I would have done exactly the same.’ In his conference speech he said that ‘the security threat of the 21st century is not countries waging conventional war’ but ‘the threat is chaos.