FROM JEREMY PAXMAN AND EMILY MAITLIS
Hello
From Jeremy Paxman in Manchester The late poet laureate, Ted Hughes, once wrote to Wendy Cope (surely Newsnight's nominee for the post - start writing in now) to explain why he liked her work. What he enjoyed, he said, was her ability to hit the nail on the head while everyone else was trying to hang a painting on it.
I suspect that Gordon Brown's medium of choice isn't poetry (what is it? - textbooks on neo-classical endogenous growth theory? - spreadsheets?) But he must have hoped he'd do much the same with his speech this afternoon. The question tonight will be how many portraits of an alternative leader are still hanging inside the cupboards of his MPs.
From the first chords of Iggy Pop on the warm-up tape, to the last blast on the conference's collective kazoo, the performance was relentlessly upbeat. Lots of bragging about what Labour's done, lots of talk about how he's going to fashion a new world settlement, based on the idea of fairness.
They wheeled his wife, Sarah, on to introduce his speech (which included remarks about how he wouldn't use his children as political props). Then he steamed on, about how he was what he was, and how deeply felt his convictions were. The aim was to weld the party and the leader together - he even, almost, said as much.
They seemed to love it in the hall, all right. But then, it would have had to have been utterly lamentable for that not to be the case. My guess, for what it's worth (utterly nothing - ed) is that it was enough. For now. But I'm not sure the pictures are going to be stuck on e-Bay just yet.
Join us at 10.30 tonight for (I hope) some more considered analysis from David Grossman and Michael Crick.
And from Emily Maitlis in London You can understand why anyone might pause before writing a cheque for £700 billion.
Here in London we'll be talking about the US government super-bailout which appears - much to the markets' concern - to have stalled.
Today, Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke faced tough questioning by the senate banking committee.
What seemed - amidst the horror of last week's crisis - to be a lifeline is now looking, in the clearer light of the world surviving another week, to be a little hasty.
Can they afford to do it? Can they afford not to? As one US commentator put it, "if there's one thing worse than failing to save the financial system it's spending £700 billion and then still failing to save the financial system".
And Mark Urban is at the UN General Assembly, where President Bush and President Ahmadinejad are both giving speeches.
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