Labour conference: flat as your hat

Oh I do like to be beside the sea…well normally anyway and this Labour Party Conference is very far from “normal”. For a start it is flat, flat as yer hat.

Secondly all those luvvies, or most of them, have evaporated back whence they came. We are down to the formidable rump of Trades Unionists (mainly well past fifty-year-olds) some MPs (those who don’t feel totally broken by the expenses scandal), some ministers and a bemused collection of hacks.

Curiously most of the latter to whom I’ve spoken seem to feel Gordon Brown did rather well on the Andrew Marr show. The eyes and drugs were a bit part player in which the PM appeared to make a very coherent argument for another term in the job – ranging accessibly and relaxed from the macro (I saved the world economy) to the micro (this is why we can see serious green shoots etc).

Should he have been asked about the drugs? Well he gave a perfectly good answer. Labour’s problem here in Brighton is that the election remains theirs to lose, and they are working overtime to achieve that – they don’t need to.

Too many senior Labour pols are talking about what they will do “next”. And by the way, a US journo friend who was on Obama’s “bus” at the UN and at the G20 expressed total disbelief at the antics of the UK press lobby. She’d never seen such pack performance outside the USSR. American hacks, she tells me, regarded the Obama/Brown snub story simply absurd.

Here in Brighton the atmosphere at the Conference hotel, the Hilton, is as if much beloved Aunt Gladys has died on the sixth floor. Voices are lowered, movement is slow and respectful for fear of waking the dead.

So I took an hour out this morning to see how Brighton is and pick up a couple of my favourite pens. Half way up the street I am approached by an unshaven ruddy faced man who looks as if he may have fallen on hard times.

“Yer trousers is ripped,” he tells me confidentially. I look down and he’s right. Cycling has taken a toll on my seat and I have suffered a serious wardrobe malfunction. I turn into Duke Street carrying my Rymans plastic bag with my pens as protective outer wear.

The second clothing shop I pass bids me a cheery “Good morning Mr Snow”. I confide in the manageress that I am need of a tailor. “Just missed him,” says her assistant. She directs me through assorted twists and turns past M&S, Top Shop and more.

I find Agnews up one of Brighton’s many hills. “We don’t make suits,” says the loan man at the ironing board. “We mend and alter them.”

I lay my problem bare, he springs into action and within three minutes he has ironed a “supportive gusset” into the offending zone, within three minutes he’s added a machine stitch and within five I’m out.

He wanted no money but I inflicted twenty quid on him. When a man stands between a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction and the Labour party conference somehow money becomes the least of ones problems.