There can be no question who won the beauty contest that the party conference season has become: Dave. Forgetting the bizarre spectacle of Nick Clegg, the putative next prime minister showed up Gordon Brown as the weird, introverted, in-denial failure that he so abundantly is. Game and set: and now we just have to wait until next spring to see whether it is match.
Dave is a PR man and all his skills, plus those of the PR men with whom he surrounds himself, were in evidence in his tour de force on Thursday. You will forgive me for making the obvious point that these are not identical to the skills required to govern Britain, especially when Britain is the basket-case Mr Brown has made of it. Dave has had much credit for being realistic about the mess we are in, but, actually, it was easy for him. Mr Brown's elaborate fantasies about the state of the nation, peddled at his own conference 10 days ago, were so self-evidently absurd that Dave could do nothing but highlight them by spelling out how things really are.
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