Gordon Brown’s first leader’s speech had a hole in the middle. It was long on vision and on personal morality, coupled with a mixture of new and reheated microproposals: on bullying, gun crime, maternity leave, matrons and clean wards, etc. There were lots of promises but no sense of how they are to be financed or achieved. It was a speech to comfort, but not to challenge, his party. The hole was the absence of any explicit strategy.

Mr Brown knows that when he talks about the challenge of two billion people in China and India it means that Britain has to be more competitive and market-driven. There has to be more flexibility and fewer regulations. But we heard none of this; the factors needed to create wealth were ignored.

Similarly, he failed to mention the constraints on his public-sector activism. As Chancellor, he announced a marked slowdown in the growth of overall public spending from next spring, down from more than 5 per cent a year in real terms earlier in the decade to 2 per cent at most. This means that it will be much harder to achieve his goals: free universal education and training up to 18, personal tutors and abolishing child poverty.

No one would dispute Mr Brown’s concern about the failure of so many young people to develop their potential, and to become disaffected, either unemployed or unsatisfactorily employed. This is at the root of worries over crime.

But how are school standards to be raised? The evidence of the past decade is that it will be done only by changing existing structures and promoting greater diversity via specialist trust and academy schools. That has been, and is, very unpopular with many in the Labour Party and among teacher unions.

Similarly, in health, necessary changes to enable people to see a doctor, hospital or clinic when they want and to ensure that wards are clean will not occur without the right incentives. Mr Brown is correct about making public services accessible and personal to all. But that requires diversity of supply and patient choice, which he is reluctant to mention. They challenge the interests of public-sector unions. But keeping Unison content is not the route to a personal health service.

Tony Blair often seemed to relish confrontation with these established interests. Mr Brown dislikes fighting his own party, but the absence of any discussion of the arguments about public-service reform meant that his speech lacked coherence and an underlying argument.

He avoided hints about election timing, or any mention of the Tories, leaving all his options open. His campaign appeal, when it comes, will be about “shaping and expanding the centre ground”. But we are no nearer to understanding how a Brown Britain would work in five or ten years’ time.

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