I nipped out of the Labour conference at Brighton yesterday, for a haircut. A few hundred yards up the road from the steel barricades and placard-waving trade unionists I found a no-nonsense-looking place, entered and was shown to a barber’s chair. My head spun with conference talk and conference excitement about whatever was the gollygosh conference news of the hour. Clippers aloft, a calm woman set about my undistinguished locks.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“I’m a journalist, here to report the conference.”

“Conference?”

“You know, the Labour one. The Prime Minister’s speaking this afternoon.”

“Prime Minister?” Er . . . Oh yes . . . Gordon . . . er . . . Brown.” Pause. “Which conference did you say?”

“Labour. You know — the Government.”

“The Government . . . yes. Mm . . . yes. So that’s what it’s all about. Mm . . . isn’t it nice, this sunny September weather . . ?”

Pale and interesting

Beside the conference centre, the Grand Hotel sits within the security zone, fenced from the seafront promenade it faces. At night its façade is lit, like the forecourt, by pale-blue floodlighting. Pale-blue people sit outside smoking pale-blue cigarettes or drinking pale-blue gins and tonic: unreal inhabitants of a parallel universe. I remarked to a friend on the ethereal illumination. “Yes,” he said. “Did you know this lighting is what they install in public lavatories where people are known to inject drugs or to self-harm? In blue light you can’t find your veins.”

A nod and a wink

The most important thought hanging over a party conference is so often unspoken. What’s voiced you can usually discount. The most overused cliché — on the platform and off it — among Labour here in Brighton has been “it’s the economy, stupid”. This exhausted aphorism would be overdue for retirement even if it were true. Sadly for Labour this autumn, it isn’t true. It’s the Prime Minister, stupid.

Which leads me to something I like about Peter Mandelson. Nobody could call Lord M candid but he does have what we might describe as a wary regard for the truth. As one might glance sideways at a rottweiler that it would be unwise to provoke but foolish to ignore, so the First Secretary’s speech to Progress, a party pressure group, on Sunday eyed the “it’s the Prime Minister, stupid” question, acknowledged it and then — with a few kind words about Gordon’s splendid leadership — dismissed it as erroneous. Nobody else on the panel mentioned the Gordon problem. People are flattered, I think, when a speaker obliged to dissimulate does them the courtesy of almost winking.

That flattering wink distinguished Lord Mandelson from the speaker who followed him, Liam Byrne, the Treasury Chief Secretary. Mr Byrne is simply brazen.

If Lord M and Mr B were minicab controllers and you rang to complain that your car had not arrived, Mandelson would breathe into the phone “Forgotten you? Perish the thought. Your fortunate driver is — as they say — on his way.”

Mr Byrne would insist the car was right in front of you, even if you couldn’t actually see it.

Forgo’en voice

For some years Mr Byrne has been dumbing down his accent by employing the cockney (or estuarial) glottal stop: Britain becomes Bri’n and the bottom line is the bo’om line. It’s very new Labour and a bit 2002. Mr Byrne’s speech began in cool and measured terms, glo’al stops all ar’fully inser’ed. But as he worked himself up into what passes in politics for passion, he did the opposite of forgetting to talk proper: he forgot not to talk proper. All those naughty little middle-class Ts began to reappear.

Heaven forbid that Mr Byrne should ever become seriously animated. He might start talking like a duke.

Written in the stars

Home we all come from Brighton, babbling about Labour’s missed opportunities and Gordon Brown’s hugely disappointing failure to emerge as one of the great orators of history. But did we seriously expect to find ourselves reaching any other judgment? If you blindfolded me, spun me in a time machine, materialised me into the auditorium of a party conference being staged I knew not when — and asked me if I sniffed the mood of a jubilant/resolute/ despairing/suicidal (choose as appropriate) occasion, I doubt that I could reply before reading the morning’s papers. I sometimes think that, like the stars at night, a party conference is really just a random series of dots.

We join them up into bulls, bears, fishes or scorpions as we choose.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die