Brown vows to ‘change the world again’ in make-or-break Labour speech

THIS was billed as Gordon Brown’s “make or break speech — the most crucial speech of his political life”. His performance at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton yesterday, we were told, would decide whether he would cling on to the premiership or start the grisly process of his removal from power.

For a man who had been denounced by one of his own parliamentary colleagues as a “dead man walking”, Mr Brown demonstrated in his opening comments that he was very much alive — far more lively and more bullish and smiley than he had been for months.

The conference, anticipating a repetition of the dreary, often droning delivery that sometimes typifies Mr Brown’s speeches, sat up shocked when, within seconds of mounting the platform, he roared: “We have changed the world once and we are going to change the world again.”