Gordon at Progress Conference

Registration for the annual Progress Conference started at 9:00 yesterday morning at Congress Hall, TUC. The first keynote address was due to start at 10:00. As usual, despite my very best intentions, I was running late and I arrived at about 9:45 and went straight down to get a coffee in the TUC lower hall.

To my surprise the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, came down the stairs and started to shake everybody’s hand he came across including my own. I could only think at the time of saying “Hello Prime Minister”. Now of course I can think of all sorts of profound and convincing statements to say to him. But at the time it was only “Hello”. I couldn’t find my camera either to take a photo - but there you go.

It is only when you are up close to him that you realise that he is literally such a “big bloke” with a barrel like chest and rugby playing shoulders. His famous “big clunking fist” would indeed deliver quite a knock out punch. Light weight Tory leaders and egg throwers beware.

Gordon was the surprise keynote speaker and had not been on the original agenda. As soon as he entered the main hall there was a spontaneous standing ovation for him. Most of the audience didn’t have a clue that he was going to be there. He took over the platform for a confident and far reaching 20 minute speech, delivered without any obvious notes or screens (how do these people do it?).

I felt he was very buoyant but wanting to appear very calm. I think that the current financial crisis “extraordinary times need extraordinary solutions” is bringing out the best in him. It is “the biggest New Labour Project...it falls on us to deliver...We live in a global financial system where there is no global supervision" It’s personal as well, he talked about a women who wrote to him who had invested her savings in an Icelandic bank and could not any reassurance about her money. She had not slept for the previous 4 days. "We need to apply lasting values to new circumstances... Labour is the greatest force for fairness in our society. ..The lesson is that only progressive forces work”.

He also importantly, I think, gave an impression of optimism, not all is doom and gloom and in the long term we will come out of this. I managed to ask a question about the role that Governance failure in Banks, fund managers, accountants, actuaries etc, played in the current financial crisis and whether the concept of citizen investor will help prevent future failures. Gordon was I thought a bit wary in his answer but he assured us that once the crisis was under control there will be significant and wide reaching regulatory change in the future to prevent such things happening again. Fair enough.

In the last Progress conference I attended in 2006, Tony Blair was the keynote speaker. This was also in the same hall in Congress House. Tony had recently “agreed” to resign and delivered a blinding farewell speech. Later on I saw Gordon speak in this same location during the London trade union hustings for the deputy leadership election. He was very well received by that audience. Gordon left the Progress stage yesterday to another standing ovation.

I’ll post later on the rest of conference.