IT WAS a funny peculiar first day in Manchester. There was Tony Blair up there on stage, sitting at the very edge of the elongated platform desk that held eight people. It seemed an appropriate seating plan. (Gordon was in the middle, as cosy as could be.) Everyone kept talking about renewal but the feeling in the air in Manchester is autumnal. Something is ending here.

It was the first day of Tony Blair’s last conference and this makes everything seem slightly more important than it is. He won’t say whether he’s even coming to conference next year but I am sure that he would never want to miss out on scenes such as yesterday’s traditional wrangle over the agenda. “If democracy is good enough for the Middle East, then it should be good enough for us!” cried a delegate. How naive is that? Still, it will be something for Tony and Cherie’s memory scrapbook.

The security is incredible. The city centre has been turned into a sterile zone where a machinegun is almost a normal accessory item. It is like a Die Hard set without Bruce Willis. I spotted a midge flying round and wondered how it had managed to get in. All normal life is elsewhere, beyond the barricades.

This has pluses though, not least that I actually saw the Prime Minister as a pedestrian. Normally I only ever see him walk to his Jag.

But there he was yesterday, striding down the road. He was heading as quickly as possible away from his Andrew Marr interview and towards the haven of church (no one asks him about Gordon Brown when he is praying). He had an entourage of eight. This seemed a bit paltry, actually, though next year there will be even fewer to run along silently next to him. The first few hours of conference were dominated by the tiny red dynamo that is Hazel Blears. She used to be in charge of ASBOs at the Home Office and now she is party chair. There is a logic there when you think about it. She is almost pathologically upbeat and chirped away with terrifying optimism.

God knows what TB thought as he watched her. Actually, bizarrely, he was the only one on the platform who was watching her directly.

The other seven, including the Great Gordo, were glued to the personal laptops placed in front of them, which showed what was going on right next to them. It looks rather strange, as if they are all on long-distance flights instead of on the platform at the Labour Party conference.

There was a particularly excruciating passage where we saw a film about Hazel working in Tesco for two days over the summer. Tesco says “Every little helps” but this may not apply to Hazel. The experiment is part of the Labour Party’s Let’s Talk campaign, which aims to reconnect ministers with normal people.

To judge from the film, it is not clear that normal people want to reconnect with Hazel, particularly if fruit is involved. We saw her, standing in front of the citrus bins, hectoring some poor woman who only wanted to buy a lemon. But Hazel had intercepted said lemon, and was brandishing it in front of the woman like a grenade.

“Do you want this to make zest for a cake?” demanded Hazel. The customer nodded weakly. “Then you want unwaxed!” cried Hazel.

I am not sure if the woman ever got her lemon. She may have regretted ever even wanting one. Tony Blair is going to miss moments like this, that is for sure.

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