At last, after party conferences, elections on, elections off, PMQs and Europe statements, trips to California and everything else … a quiet day in the office. A chance to write speeches, sort out correspondence and plan for the future.

There is a break in the middle of the day to attend the unveiling of the statue of David Lloyd George in Parliament square. A danger lurks in all these events – and this time it is the Welsh national anthem. Someone – I can’t remember who – once told me “if you don’t know the words just keep your mouth shut and don’t nod”. Sound advice.

It’s quite hard to remember a month in politics quite like the last one. See-sawing polls, an election that never happened, rowdy scenes in the Commons and a real question of whether “the plates” are shifting.

Put aside the speeches, the policies, the rows about troop announcements and all the rest of it, I think the real change is this. My party now has three important things: a clear definition of its modern credo, an explanation of the challenges we need to meet in the modern world and a hunger to fight and win.

Meantime, the Labour Party seems to have lost all three. “Where Labour goes post Blair?” is now becoming a question just as pressing as “what do the Tories do after Thatcher?” was for us. So far Brown has failed to answer – and as he cancelled an election to set out his vision, the pressure to come up with a big answer is growing all the time.

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