WHEN WE WERE children, grown-ups took us to matinée performances at the cinema. Inside, all was dark. We forgot the daylight and dust, the afternoon sun slanting down on a world of school, and homework, and things that didn’t always go right. Here in the soft darkness of a transfigured night, things seemed to glow. We suspended disbelief and watched the silver screen, and were taken into a simpler world: of heroes and villains, of magic, mischief and happy endings.

From our seats in the dark the screen shone, our matinée idols shone, meanings were clear, and every story had a conclusion.

And do you remember being led back into the afternoon, surprised by the light? For a happy hour the day had gone away. Now, as you blinked in the glare, it almost seemed that this was the fake: this harsh, flat light, this tangle of anxieties, this mess of unconnected facts, this story with no narrative. Perhaps this was the world that didn’t matter? Perhaps it would go away? Slowly the film faded. In the dark we had watched a trick: just a performance.

The G-MEX Centre in Manchester is a disused railway station. Giant blackout blankets curtain its grand Victorian arch, creating a magnificent auditorium. The music throbs. In the gloom — and as the crimsons and purples of the Labour Conference’s Technicolor sunset of a backdrop glow — the sense of theatre swells. For one glorious hour on Tuesday the Prime Minister took this stage and held us spellbound. Two giant screens to either side of the tiny figure between them, beamed him at us. It was impossible not to follow our latter-day Prospero, Tony Blair, into the transfigured world — the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces/The solemn temples, the great globe itself . . . — that, briefly, he wove for us.

Now in the hard afternoon light as I write, I have the text with me. But I no longer have the speech. Such stuff as dreams are made on, it has melted into air, into thin air; and all that remains is a crumpled text, staples adrift, paragraphs suddenly prosaic, sentiments cheesy. Scrawled into the margins are my notes: the dodged incovenient truths, the twisted logic, the hilarious non-sequiturs, the winking falsehoods. This dog-eared thing is not the speech that everyone in that darkened space will remember for the rest of our lives.

For Tony Blair’s hour in the spotlight we saw him as radiating light in the darkness. Only as I passed through the blackout blankets and back into the afternoon, could I remember that it has sometimes been the other way round.

• I AM BECOMING worried about Gordon Brown’s moral compass. The expression made a prominent appearance in his speech, and has started popping up all over the Daily Mail. But what is a moral compass? Mr Brown was anxious to tell us that he got one from his parents. I think he means he has morals. This comes as a relief, though ideally one would prefer to receive the news from others, and we should always be a little doubtful about politicians who fall in love with their own probity: such affairs can turn sour.

  Besides, is a compass much use in these days of GPS-guided navigation? A truly 21st-century contender for the Labour leadership should surely boast a moral sat-nav. As he negotiates his path through life’s maze, a faintly prim lady’s voice will coo: now . . . turn . . . left. As scantily clad women beckon from the kerb ahead, the voice will say execute . . . U-turn . . . immediately. Most important of all, the device would be enhanced by one of those in-car systems that sounds an urgent warning when hidden cameras are close.

• I DO NOT KNOW and maybe never will, whether the heavy biblical undertones in Tony Blair’s speeches are conscious or unconscious Christian references. The Sermon on the Mount seems to have made a particular impression. Some years ago his conference speech urged delegates to rejoice rather than feel discouraged when others mocked them, or thwarted them, or ignored them . . . or (I thought) reviled them or said all manner of things against them — for they shall inherit the Earth.

  In Tuesday’s speech, the PM concluded by assuring his party that, though he might seem to be departing, “I’m always with you”.

  “Yea,” I thought, “even unto the end of the World.”

  Click here to listen to Matthew Parris's Labour conference 'polcast'

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