Listening to Newsnight some hours after Brown's speech, the disappointment is beginning to flow through the conference. After the floral rhetoric, the parade of the hausfrau and a list of the achievements, there is a ebbing confidence in the policies set out.
The penal crackdown on teenage pregnancies, a new voting system that will actually benefit Labour and a whole raft of warmed up leftovers from the Blair years. Like all of Brown's speeches, the initial triumph is soon picked apart as the wheels fall off. The Sun has already come out against.
By outlining a series of political, economic and social reforms, Mr Brown was sending out the message that Labour meant change for the majority and the Tories for the privileged few.
Again, the most important insight that Brown recognised was that this is the most radical election since 1979. If the choice between the Tories and Labour narrowed under Blair, clear red water was seized by the philosophy of an "activist government" under the looming threats of the Great Decession. Instead of New Labour, we find ourselves full circle with the pale ghost of Kinnockian democratic socialism, revamped in an authoritarian wrapper.
The three big challenges that Mr Brown needed to tackle — the country’s dire fiscal position, the collapse of confidence in the political system and the difficulties faced in Afghanistan — were left, by the end of the speech, untackled....
And then there was Afghanistan. A war in which British troops are dying every week and that is rapidly losing public support merited, apparently, only four paragraphs of bland support for the Armed Forces. This was not good enough.
This was not good enough.