Yesterday the quiet man turned up the volume. He got out there. He was on the front foot. He tore a chunk out of the Tories. He told his story. He affirmed that Labour was winning the battle of ideas. He showed his fighting spirit. He did everything that they have been telling him to do all week.

There is just one difficulty. What they have been telling him to do all week — his old friend Alistair Darling, his new friend Peter Mandelson, his conference delegates, one after the other — won’t work.

Now, I’ve a soft spot for clichés (which, incidentally, came in handy sitting through the Prime Minister’s speech). A nice, well-worn cliché can embody the wisdom of the ages. But there is no excuse for one that isn’t true. And just such a cliché is “all this party has to do is get on the front foot”. For getting on the front foot is a terrible idea. Getting on the front foot is the last thing Labour should be doing. In fact, any Labour supporters reading this piece who happen to find themselves on the front foot, should change to their other foot immediately.

You see, there is an odd thing about “getting on the front foot”. It sounds like an empty, well-meaning, rallying cry. It is to be heard at every conference where a party is losing hopelessly. I’ve been at plenty, believe me. I’ve given standing ovations to some pretty ropey speeches. It’s a rallying cry that bucks up everyone in the hall, lifts the spirits, as it has this week (a little). But “getting on the front foot”, is more than that. It is a package of powerful ideas, a programme of action. And each part of it takes Labour (as it did the Tories before them) in the wrong direction.

Let’s start with the idea, item one of the front-foot manifesto, that Labour should “show some fighting spirit”. Fighting what? Reality? The voters? No, I guess they must mean the Conservatives. That is why the stuff about fighting spirit is so often accompanied by a call to tear a chunk out of the Tories.

The problem is that showing fighting spirit by tearing a chunk out of the Tories has all the allure for voters that a man ending the night with a drunken bar-room fight has for a girl on a first date. Voters don’t want aggressive attacks. They find them silly and demeaning. They are not remotely convinced by one party’s characterisation of another.

Yesterday the Prime Minister showed why. His assault on the Tories was ridiculous. Gordon Brown had them cutting frontline services on purpose, while he cunningly found the money by making things more efficient. Why would the Tories do that? Because they have “no hearts”, he explained. I am not a doctor, but I am pretty sure that isn’t right. The Prime Minister wanted to make the Conservatives look bad but succeeded only in making himself look bad (a trick we will doubtless see in reverse next week).

But even if Mr Brown’s attack on the Tories had been more convincing and attractive it would still have been irrelevant. As Andrew Cooper, of the pollsters Populus, explained to Labour members at The Times fringe meeting in Brighton on Monday, voters already harbour doubts about the Tories. But they intend to vote for them anyway because they don’t want Labour any more. They want change.

That’s why the second item of the front-foot manifesto is such an error. Under no circumstances should Labour “get out there and tell its story”. People are well aware of the story, and that’s the problem. However passionately Labour may believe that its record is something to be proud of (and I can understand that feeling entirely), it is not an election winner. If it were, the party would not be on 26 per cent or so in the opinion polls. The best part of Mr Brown’s speech came when he listed Labour’s achievements. The hall cheered, but it would be a gross error to believe that the country will.

The voters believe that it is time for a change. Labour stands a chance only if it shows that it understands this, if it shows that it is willing and able to change. Getting out there and telling its story just gets in the way.

The third item of the front-foot manifesto is the assertion, made on Monday by the otherwise magnificent Lord Adonis, that whatever the polls may say, “we are winning the battle of ideas”. With whom?

New Labour has some ideological victories to its name, but the most striking feature of the past year has been the collapse of one of the central pillars of new Labour economics. In two elections the party asserted that it was possible, indeed necessary, to increase public spending faster than the rate of economic growth. The Conservatives argued (and lost while doing so) that if we did this, eventually we would hit the buffers. And so we have.

Labour cannot fight the election without facing this. The Prime Minister’s speech yesterday was rendered incoherent by a failure to address the fiscal crisis (there were other candidates, but this was the central cause of incoherence).

He announced a series of spending plans — national care service, workhouses for single mums, family intervention, police intervention, industrial intervention — without the merest hint of where the money will come from. Later his advisers said that it would come from efficiency savings. Gosh, we have really been inefficient, haven’t we? Somebody should find whoever was in charge and remonstrate with them.

Labour should be facing its failures rather than crowing about the battle of ideas.

There is one more item on the front-foot manifesto. It favours empty boosterism and “cheering up the troops” over serious analysis and a grip on reality. On Monday the brilliant, insightful, hard-headed Lord Mandelson became an absurd cabaret act. When I saw that even he had succumbed to such nonsense, I realised that Labour had reached the end. Tony Blair famously said that when the Labour Party learnt to love Peter Mandelson his project would be over. This has turned out to be literally true.

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