It’s clearly not the Brighton train – at least, not the one I caught to Labour this time last week. This is unmistakably the Virgin tipping train to Manchester.

It may be 6.17 in the morning, but the differences are palpable. There’s a lot of Louis Vuitton bags aboard. More Dell than Apple. The overall presentation is more quaffed, more Jacqmar. More tied around the throat… clean, dull, more white-shirted (like me, I suppose – well, if you leave out the tie).

Yes, I’m en route to the Tory conference – a leap into the unknown in a kind of a way. What is the Conservative party now? Who is David Cameron?

I’m not sure I can remember a UK political party gathering that has been so full of unknowns. Europe, inheritance tax, cuts, slashing incapacity benefit…

They don’t add up to quite the ideology that propelled Thatcher into power. And yet we are being told that Cameron is set on a course that will deliver a scale of triumph she can only have dreamt of.

Let’s see how it pans out this week. Deadpan it won’t be. Pre-coronational, I slightly doubt. The “None Of The Above” party is still with us, I suspect, rendering the conventional battle rather tighter than some of my fellow hacks like to imagine. Don’t forget.

On Thursday the Channel 4 News website will be providing extended live coverage of David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative conference, including film extracts, expert analysis and Twitter commentary.

To watch and contribute, go to www.channel4.com/news from midday on 8 October.

The Sun’s associate editor, Trevor Kavanagh has confirmed that Rupert Murdoch was central to the Sun’s decision to switch horses in British politics.

Should we care?

It might be worth considering what New Labour ever got out of supping with the old media war horse. Tony Blair flew all the way to Hayman Island off Australia’s Great Barrier reef to secure his backing in 1997.

Since when Rupert has been seen scurrying in and out of Downing street on a very much more than annual basis. Surprisingly this has continued under Gordon Brown’s leadership.

Freedom of Information revelations have spelt out some of the ways in which Murdoch’s interest have benefited from Downing Street’s assistance. But a full inventory will never be established despite FOI.

It was after Hurricane Katrina had devastated New Orleans and revealed failings in the Bush administration’s response that Blair is quoted as telling Murdoch “the BBC is full of hatred of America”.

It quite simply cannot be good for democracy that one man can so play with the interests of a land of 61 million souls.

It is now being said that Mr Cameron’s Tories now themselves have a ‘deal’ with Murdoch whose Sun newspaper has come out in their support. What is it and how will the electorate be kept informed of its influence and antics?

It is fair to say the Sun doesn’t have quite the traction it once did. But News Corp and its parent News International is a multi-platform entity with influences that reach every corner of the world.

When the Sun shines, Murdoch has switched the light on – what’s the charge for the power source?

Few of us thought we’d live to see the day when a Labour party conference would rise as one to their feet in a standing ovation for Peter Mandelson. But today they did.

Of course, we have seen it before – when Michael Heseltine did the same for the improbable electoral prospects of John Major.

Mandelson has locked his destiny to that of Gordon Brown in a manner which it is hard to see even him managing to unpick and excuse away. It was a terrific conference speech – a coherent and intriguing argument for staying in power.

But as the fishes leapt from the depths to caress the soles of the risen Peter walking the water above them, there must have been many in the hall here in Brighton who were wondering who else besides Mandelson would be left on deck with any energy to join him in power.

Brown smiled and clapped his way through the speech. Any ancient hatreds have been buried in the cause of what is now the most tumultuous love.

There is, it seems, nothing like rising from the dead twice for liberating the political soul. Mandelson is liberated, free and orating in a manner we have not seen from him before.

Of course, he is prone to the odd road accident in politics, but one senses he is stronger, more relaxed and at ease in the headlights of other oncoming political vehicles. To use a cricketing analogy, Mandelson is for the Tories the Ricky Ponting that has to be got out for them to stand a chance of victory.

He’s up and dangerous. He could be Brown’s saviour and the party’s damnation. Or the saviour of both. Either way, at the end of it he leaves a little more than his previous footnotes in history.

It may have started flat, but tonight as the hall swelled to health and safety-busting over-capacity, there was a spirit alive. It may be a puncturable mirage or it may go down as one of the great conference speeches.

Oh I do like to be beside the sea…well normally anyway and this Labour Party Conference is very far from “normal”. For a start it is flat, flat as yer hat.

Secondly all those luvvies, or most of them, have evaporated back whence they came. We are down to the formidable rump of Trades Unionists (mainly well past fifty-year-olds) some MPs (those who don’t feel totally broken by the expenses scandal), some ministers and a bemused collection of hacks.

Curiously most of the latter to whom I’ve spoken seem to feel Gordon Brown did rather well on the Andrew Marr show. The eyes and drugs were a bit part player in which the PM appeared to make a very coherent argument for another term in the job – ranging accessibly and relaxed from the macro (I saved the world economy) to the micro (this is why we can see serious green shoots etc).

Should he have been asked about the drugs? Well he gave a perfectly good answer. Labour’s problem here in Brighton is that the election remains theirs to lose, and they are working overtime to achieve that – they don’t need to.

Too many senior Labour pols are talking about what they will do “next”. And by the way, a US journo friend who was on Obama’s “bus” at the UN and at the G20 expressed total disbelief at the antics of the UK press lobby. She’d never seen such pack performance outside the USSR. American hacks, she tells me, regarded the Obama/Brown snub story simply absurd.

Here in Brighton the atmosphere at the Conference hotel, the Hilton, is as if much beloved Aunt Gladys has died on the sixth floor. Voices are lowered, movement is slow and respectful for fear of waking the dead.

So I took an hour out this morning to see how Brighton is and pick up a couple of my favourite pens. Half way up the street I am approached by an unshaven ruddy faced man who looks as if he may have fallen on hard times.

“Yer trousers is ripped,” he tells me confidentially. I look down and he’s right. Cycling has taken a toll on my seat and I have suffered a serious wardrobe malfunction. I turn into Duke Street carrying my Rymans plastic bag with my pens as protective outer wear.

The second clothing shop I pass bids me a cheery “Good morning Mr Snow”. I confide in the manageress that I am need of a tailor. “Just missed him,” says her assistant. She directs me through assorted twists and turns past M&S, Top Shop and more.

I find Agnews up one of Brighton’s many hills. “We don’t make suits,” says the loan man at the ironing board. “We mend and alter them.”

I lay my problem bare, he springs into action and within three minutes he has ironed a “supportive gusset” into the offending zone, within three minutes he’s added a machine stitch and within five I’m out.

He wanted no money but I inflicted twenty quid on him. When a man stands between a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction and the Labour party conference somehow money becomes the least of ones problems.