Political Editor Chris Lloyd scrutinises Gordon Brown’s speech made in Brighton yesterday and wonders how many outside the conference hall were jolted into listening.

LAST year, Gordon Brown’s speech to the Labour Party conference was billed as the speech of his life. And last year, at the end of a typically Gordon Brown speech, he appeared just to be treading water – not drowning but still floundering, not able to set his own course but being driven by the winds of the global economic storm.

Yesterday was Groundhog Day.

It happened all over again.

Exactly the same.

Up to 20 points behind the Conservatives and possibly even trailing the Liberal Democrats in third, this speech – his last to conference before the General Election and so probably his last as Prime Minister and party leader – had to be the speech of his life.

He had to do to the country what Lord Mandelson had done the day before to the conference: grab the hall with the sheer magnetism of his personality, dazzle the delegates with his chutzpah, bring them to the boil with his Vaudevillian skills, and finally, make them love him.

That would have been different. That would have been a real change.

Instead, yesterday Gordon Brown delivered a typically Gordon Brown speech.

It was a good speech, solid and redoubtable.

It contained some good ideas that will improve many lives. It was big on values, fairness and responsibility, and it was delivered by a man who, whatever anyone may say, has been pivotal in preventing the world economy from sliding from recession into depression.

But – just like last year – it did not make the heart dance, nor the spirit soar.

It had little personal warmth – just like last year, his wife, Sarah, was drafted in as his warm-up act to provide a human face – and was almost devoid of humour.

With a clunky slogan pinned to the microphone – “securing Britain’s economic recovery”

– it progressed awkwardly with its chunky catchline “the change we choose” jarring. It was only nimble in the way it danced around the enormous £175bn elephant of debt in the room while announcing more ideas about how to spend more money.

Mr Brown may be right that the elderly need free personal care, that every two-year-old needs a free childcare place, that we need a £1bn investment bank, that we need enhanced pensions and cancer care, that we need a network of supervised homes for pregnant youngsters, but where will the money come from?

He may be right that the Tories will devastate our public services with their cuts, but that doesn’t excuse his blithe bobbing in the water, promising to maintain some budgets and increase others, and allow “spending discipline”

to mend the public finances.

And so, just like last year, yesterday’s speech of a lifetime changed nothing.

The public made up its mind about Mr Brown more than 18 months ago and stopped listening to him. This shut-out has been so complete that the public has hardly noticed his role in avoiding worldwide depression – certainly not in the way that the German people this week re-elected and rewarded Angela Merkel for steering their country away from recession.

THE British public regards Mr Brown as a backroom Chancellor and no matter how it tries, it cannot see him as a charismatic, dynamic frontman. It cannot clutch him to the nation’s bosom. He’s too dour, heavy, grey, cold, drab and he does that unsettling fish-like thing with his jaw.

Yesterday, nothing changed. He was the same Gordon Brown as last year, hunched over his lectern in his dark suit and unimaginative tie, still performing that unsettling jawdrop.

There was nothing that would make a member of the electorate jolt suddenly upright, ears pricked and think: “We’ve misjudged that Brown fellow all along.”

In fact, by changing neither tone nor substance nor presentation, Mr Brown was being surprisingly defiant for one so far behind in the polls. Despite his talk of “the change you choose”, he seemed to be saying that he was not changing for anyone.

And so, 12 months further on, he is still treading water. Like last year, his head is just above the waterline, but he is not making any progress, and no one within his party is brave enough to duck him under.

But unlike last year when the election was a distant dot on the horizon, it is now bearing down on him like a giant cross-Channel ferry.

The polls say it will be a bloody collision.

They will not have been altered much by yesterday’s speech.

However, the fair wind of economic recovery may spring up in the eight months until polling day and blow him towards a safer place. The British public might then become more receptive to yesterday’s messages. They might come to accept the 12-year history of Labour achievements with which Mr Brown impressively began his speech. They might start giving the Tories greater scrutiny and they might then conclude that they have no policies beyond savage cuts.

(If David Cameron has any political nous, next week he will drop his iniquitous inheritance tax cut and blame Labour for messing up the economy so much that there is no longer any room for such a measure. This would remove one of the biggest and most obvious sticks that Labour has to beat them with.) But for Mr Brown, it is all about mights: might this and might that.

He ended his speech with a plea: “Never stop believing in the good sense of the British people.

Never stop believing we can move forward to a fairer, more responsible, more prosperous Britain. Never stop believing we can make a Britain equal to its best ideals. Never, never stop believing.”

There is now nothing left but hope.