The right stuff | 29 September 2007

Ostensibly, Gordon Brown’s first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister on Monday was grandly non-partisan: there was not a single mention of the Tories or of David Cameron. In practice, the Conservative party generally, and Mr Cameron specifically, were present in every line.

Though presented as a lofty civic oratory by the father of the nation, this was in fact a brutally partisan speech by an expert Scottish machine politician. Everything was achieved by implication, but heavy implication.

First, Mr Brown presented himself as a sort of Sarkozy from Fife, translating ‘love France or leave it’ into an extended discourse on playing by the rules, British values, the need for migrants to speak English and ‘British jobs for British workers’. As one of the PM’s allies told The Spectator in July, part of Mr Brown’s strategy is to turn his ‘pathologies into assets’: that is, to transform perceived weaknesses into strengths.