By Steve Richards

After David Cameron’s ugly right wing bar room rant, disguised as a Blairite speech to the Conservative conference, we get a reminder of what the party would be like in power. Boris Johnson came over all nice and cuddly during the Mayoral campaign. Now safely in power he carries out the fantasy of right wing authoritarians in sacking Sir Ian Blair.

By Steve Richards

It is a widely held view that the party conferences have not mattered very much this year. I disagree. We have learnt a lot from the last three weeks. Politics feels different now. I have just re-read David Cameron’s speech delivered yesterday at his party conference. No wonder the Sun argues today that it could have been taken from one of their editorials. It probably was. Much of it reads like a populist right wing bar room rant: Bureaucrats can’t spell! Schools shouldn’t let down the elite! The state treats us like children! Bloody Europe!

Should Cameron’s Press Secretary, Andy Coulson, take a bow or are we finally hearing the leader’s authentic voice?

By Steve Richards

The final hours of Labour's conference came to neurotic life with ministers speculating privately that Downing Street had deliberately broken the news of Ruth Kelly's departure from the cabinet as a pre-emptive strike against any co-ordinated ministerial revolt in the coming weeks.

In this case the ministers are wrong.

By Steve Richards

Charles Clarke has done the easy bit. His article in the New Statesman is a cogent analysis of the hole that Labour is in. I agree with him in particular that labels such as ‘Blairite’ and ‘Brownite’ are meaningless, lazy terms applied too casually and leading nowhere. But Clarke is not a political columnist making an assessment of the current gloomy prospects for Labour. He is a player seeking the removal of Gordon Brown.

By Steve Richards

Can Gordon Brown survive? This is seen as the pivotal question over the coming weeks as Brown seeks to gain momentum after his first traumatic year in Downing Street. But there is a much more important and fundamental question compared with the limited one about Brown’s future. The answer will shape the political landscape in the run up to the general election. This is the key question: Can Labour stop talking to itself and address a wider audience, an art it learnt in the mid 1990s and has lost entirely in recent years?

By Steve Richards

What should most alarm Labour MPs after the Glasgow East by-election is that the party’s calamitous defeat is part of a trend and not a big surprise. Labour has been performing abysmally in local and by-elections for several years now. Its crisis is deep and not simply a matter of leadership, although inevitably the future of Gordon Brown will be brought into sharp focus once more.

By Steve Richards

In today’s newspaper I have interviewed the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. I spoke to him at length and the published interview gives a flavour of a wide ranging conversation to coincide with his first year at the Foreign Office. It reflects the themes we explored, foreign policy, Labour’s future and his own ambitions.

As the interviewer it is not for me to speculate as to whether Miliband gave the interview to set out his stall in these stormy times or to put the case more generally for the government or a combination of both. But I am convinced it is extremely important at this junction for the cabinet’s younger generation to outline their thoughts on Labour’s future direction. This is not easy when polls suggest that Brown is deeply unpopular. Interventions will be seen widely as a stirring of the pot. But at some stage one of the younger generation will take over as leader and we need to know more about them and what they believe.

By Steve Richards

The script was written before the predictable result at the Crewe and Nantwich by-election: Tories heading for landslide! Will Labour dump Brown now? Every Labour MP will be phoned by journalists over the next 24 hours in the hope that a few of them will deliver the front page quote that Brown must go.

We should all listen to, and read, very carefully any alternative options being offered by the apparently all knowing Labour dissenters. What would they do about the soaring price of oil? How would they have handled the credit crisis? Governments are hammered in by-elections when the economy is precarious and voters feel worse off. Would any new inexperienced Labour figure who has never given a moment’s thought to economic policy be a more formidable alternative to Brown in the current economic context? And while we are at it, when the focus turns on the Conservatives’ old fashioned concoction of tax breaks for families, Euro-scepticism, and the same old familiar promise to cut taxes while pledging to improve public services will voters be as keen to switch when they are electing a government?

By Steve Richards

The Conservatives have some growing up to do and they better do so quickly. Their response to Alistair Darling’s tax repair job yesterday was so weakly opportunistic that, in different political times, it would have rebounded on them dangerously. In the light of the government’s self-inflicted crisis David Cameron and George Osborne suddenly discovered an interest in giving more money to the poor, although their official policy is to take money away from the poor in order, apparently, to deal with the “causes” of poverty. For weeks the Tory leadership has demanded that the government came up with a package to deal with the losers from Gordon Brown’s last budget.

Yesterday the government came up with a package and the Conservative leadership screams: Where’s the money going to come from? This would be a perfectly valid scream if at any point they had made a suggestion as to where they would have found the money. Now in the aftermath of yesterday’s announcement they give the impression of not giving a damn for the original low paid losers. Instead they contrive to make the opposite opportunistic point to the one they were previously making: “How outrageous that the government has come up with the package when it has got to borrow money to pay for it!” Having called for such a package would the Conservatives have preferred a tax increase?

By Steve Richards

There are no qualifications. The election results are dire for Labour and a triumph for the Conservatives. The Conservatives can claim much more credibly now that they are on course to win a substantial majority in a general election. David Cameron has managed to achieve this without the equivalent disaster of a Black Wednesday when Britain left the Exchange rate Mechanism, making the leap forward even more impressive.