On Tuesday I am woken at 5.41am by a text message from a friend in Manchester: “Just wanted to say I LOVE Gordon Brown.” Blimey, what provoked this proclamation well before crow-fart? It turns out, up early with her toddler blearily watching the TV news, my friend had caught highlights of the PM’s speech. She could not, when I asked, remember a thing he’d said, but nonetheless “it lifted my spirits”.

Later that day I head for Bournemouth, a party conference virgin, to hear the verdicts on said speech from various heavyweight political commentators, which can be summarised thus: boring (very), a crude pressing of populist buttons, a weary reprise of Gordon’s “son of the Manse” schtick and a pile of phoney baloney. The YouGov poll conducted just after the speech, which showed Brown had surged 16 per cent ahead among women voters, was dismissed as unreliable, a blip: just a few months back women lurved David Cameron. Varium et mutabile semper femina etc.

Well, maybe. But while wonks and lobby lieutenants can expertly pick apart a speech to detect a fragment of Al Gore or compute 71 per cent fewer witty one-liners than conference addresses of the previous decade, much of the electorate – with better things to do – receives it at a visceral level, like a scent. And women, quick and smart judges of male character, can above all else sniff out a fraud.

Marketing is political monosodium glutamate: intended to make everything tasty, it just jades the appetite and renders all it touches the same. But even slathered in this gloop – with his better teeth, now habitual oversmiling and crispy new hair – Brown retains his clean, sharp flavour. It is the taste of moral certainty. The Blair era was marked by a nonjudgmentalism, a creeping casualness, a whatever-floats-your-boat approach to right and wrong. On the plus side this produced civil partnerships. But it also meant that to query whether the liberalisation of gambling and licensing laws might be to the detriment of communities or to hate effing and jeffing and quasi-porn on prime-time TV, marked you out as reactionary, not part of new Labour’s go-faster modern world.

Gordon Brown's Black Wednesday

The Northern Rock disaster has torn away any remaining credibility the Prime Minister had

BACKGROUND

• Sorry story tests Gordon to the limit

• Gordon, how wonderful, wise and talented am I?

• Brown’s brain and his hand are not always connected

• How 'cruel' schooling scarred Brown

That Gordon Brown’s first act in power was to sideline supercasinos and his recent pledge to review 24-hour drinking legislation have been dismissed as cheap populist deeds. But, yes, they will be popular because Brown’s political credo is not confined to dour Scottish Presbyterians and my own chapel-going Yorkshire forefathers, but a strand in the British character that transcends left-right politics, that values moderation, modesty and restraint. Just as they value the heavy stuff in Brown’s speech (met with much cynical eye-rolling by the commentators): responsibility, duty and “the great virtues of hard work”.

Like Gordon Brown, “Worcester woman”, the mythical being whose vote must be won if the Tories are to regain power, knows a vice from a virtue: she’s big on – trendy parenting term – “boundaries”. And she has not just heard Brown preaching these sentiments, she sees evidence of his beliefs in his behaviour: his discomfort in leisurewear, a lack of am-dram emoting, a slightly dull, careworn dependability – possibly not the stuff of thrilling flings, but the foundation of solid marriages.

Brown is no glitzy celebrity, but in politics at least celebrity culture has started to pall. Blair’s love affair with the limelight led him into unacceptable alliances: Bush, Berlusconi and a Bee Gee. And so while David Cameron seemed uncorrupted and pinky-fresh next to Blair, beside Brown he seems politically wafer-thin. David displaying his porridge-making skills in his family kitchen on webcam no longers seems fun and breezily Everyman against Brown, who has made no political capital from either personal tragedy or joy.

Meanwhile, Samantha Cameron, who trounced Mrs Blair in the style stakes, finds the rules changed, now the wife fight is about substance. Sarah Brown is a paragon of good works while looking in photographs as if she’d rather be anywhere else. Samantha Cameron, preening in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar to flog her £600 Smythson handbags, has begun to emit a tang of eau de Cherie.

And Brown’s appeal to both men and women is that, whatever the influence of US political consultant Bob Shrum, he is a far more British politician than Blair, with his smooth, open-necked-shirt transatlanticism. I once heard Blair answering a question about the effects of globalisation and he shrugged, smiled and said, rather patronisingly, how he felt sorry for old people who were disconcerted by the speed of change, got all confused by Bangalore call centres, but the rest of us would quickly adjust.

Brown at least acknowledges in his unfashionable use of the word “British” that our national psyche is shaken. An ever-swirling population has undermined our connection to the country and therefore to the communities in which we live, breeding an atomisation and an ever-increasing public selfishness. Right down to – as mentioned in his speech – a feeling you needn’t turn up to a doctor’s appointment if you can’t be arsed.

But more than the rhetoric, it is the monumental seriousness that has become an effortful part of Brand Brown – so that even Tessa Jowell has swapped her flicky highlighted Blair-do for a new drab, Brownite bob. Women voters look upon Gordon as the Chancellor who changed their lives: longer state-funded maternity leave, companies encouraged to introduce flexitime, free nursery places, breakfast clubs . . . dreary bread-and-butter stuff, but the Tories dare not, publicly at least, do them down.

And women feel the slow, tectonic changes in health and education that are often overlooked and belittled by those never at the school gate or the GP’s surgery. While I read that money has been wasted on management consultants while sick people wait on trolleys untreated, what I know is that the hospital that was a bleak concrete bunker when I had a baby there in 1996 now has a shiny new wing and my son saw a consultant within a week. My parents both had life-changing cataract operations with no waiting list. My son’s school now has a phalanx of classroom assistants where once there was none.

If the Tories are to win women’s votes, they need something to say to them beyond a funked-up recitation of Labour family policy. They will get nowhere trying to challenge Gordon Brown’s authenticity. One thing is certain, whether they like it or not: he is for real.

Times Recommends

• It’s the beginning of the affair
• Afghanistan: still a price worth paying
• Heroes of the downtrodden