Today, the Prime Minister, after 90 days of minor turmoils but with his predecessor forgotten like a bad dream, gives his first key note speech as Leader to the Labour Party Conference.

Nick Robinson, the BBC's Political Correspondent, has been smiling, so he says on Radio 4 this morning. The Prime Minister is avoiding talk of a 'snap election' but it is his advisers and associates who are spinning like a top. They are saying, always unattributably, that the new man is minded to seek a mandate for his programme of work rather than be bound by a Manifesto largely engineered by his rival.

The age of spin is still not over. What you read in the newspapers is still largely managed even if journalists like Nick Robinson are increasingly prepared, with a 'smile', to indicate how the stage tricks are performed. The politically interested class is wise to the trickery but the masses are still being entertained by the political Houdinis of our day.

The question is - what sources are there for the outsider to find out what is really going on? There is, of course, no real way of knowing anything except by being there, on the inside. Even then, most of those who claim to be on the inside are not. Analysts are always grasping at the straws that are handed out to them by the media or from the greedy hands of lobbyists who are only on the edge of the inside. But at least the lobbyists have seen the machinery operating. Journalists are often still in the audience.

Here is the moment to pay tribute to Ann Black, an elected (and there are damn few of those) member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee, who promised when she was first elected ten or so years ago to report back to Party members on NEC Meetings. She has kept that promise - often despite considerable pressure from the bureaucracy of the Party and those politicians who find her 'living in truth' to be inconvenient. 

An early accusation was that her reports 'helped the Tories'. This is the sort of Stalinist-think that brought the Party (as opposed to the Government) to the depressed and dire straights that culminated in the long drawn out and miserable process of getting rid of its last Leader and a membership tally way below the levels of long term sustainability. But Ann Black is never going to lose the Party an Election. If Party recovery is under way now, it has nothing to do with the bureaucrats, only a little to do with the politicians and something to do with the elected wing of the NEC just hanging on in there, despite every criticism and provocation.

Her web site will give you an archive of 'personal notes' on the NEC Meetings from November 2000 and on Policy Forum Meetings from July 1999. She has had to learn a few lessons on the way.  For example, that journalists can be weasels and deliberately misinterpret what she writes to make a 'story'. The danger was that the 'weasels' and the politicians would engage in a 'de facto' alliance to suppress this source because - you guessed it - it allegedly helped the 'Tory enemy'. 

With great courage (since the levels of unpleasantness and obstruction of which party bureaucrats can be capable has to be experienced to be believed) and not a little wisdom, she adapted but she refused to die. She just took a little more care in drafting, learning from experience in her dealings with the Press.  She still did not censor except on truly confidential and financial matters. This task might be regarded as burdensome (she has also maintained an important role within the trades union movement) yet she made that promise and she has kept it. Maybe this is what discomfits some in the professional political class. Her reward, however, has been repeated re-election - which is all that really counts in politics.

So, having praised her, what do her latest notes from September 18th tell us?  Something like 3,000 Labour members have these but they are not yet on the website. Again, a lesson learned - let the spin doctors do their bit, let the journalists tell their tale but let Party members know the truth first.  Yes, let the Barnum & Bailey's Media Circus move on to the next town. You'll have to wait or join her Party.

She has played fair by us so I am going to play fair by her. Not too many leaks on the detail - just some 'mood music'. What I can tell you is that the Prime Minister is confident, intent on re-connecting with the people and that the tone of the meetings seems very different from the meetings of his predecessor when you got the impression that Blair wanted a platform to assert his world-vision and then have the meeting concluded as quickly as possible.

It is not all smooth sailing.  Party members, especially those who lived through the mayhem of the 1980s, are not a little bitter about Brown's recent courtesy to Margaret Thatcher and his appointment of Digby Jones as Minister of Trade - but you get the impression that the Prime Minister is confident that he can stand up at an election and show Labour members and voters that his Government may be courteous to conservatives but that it is not Conservative.

The most interesting change is the relatively small attention paid to foreign policy.  Of 16 paragraphs, the equivalent of only one was spent on international issues. The boycott of the Europe-Africa Summit if Mugabe is present was a passing bone thrown to the liberal internationalists who dominated the last Government - pure gesturalism in our opinion.  It also saves the Prime Minister from one of those utterly boring and wasteful Summit trips that are such a distraction from real Government. The real meat of Brown's foreign policy - the economic regeneration model exemplified by the Brown-Cunliffe report on Palestine - was not discussed.

In that paragraph in the 'personal notes' - and, yes, I am 'leaking' now - Iraq is placed in the past as a 'mistake' with Muslim voters ready to 'come home' (and, no, this does not mean that a headline is justified that says 'Brown calls Iraq a Mistake' because that is not what the Report said), diplomatic options are still preferred to military in regard to Iran, missile defence is dismissed as largely based in Eastern Europe with no reason to change defence dispositions in the UK and the Prime Minister was prepared to meet human rights delegations. This last is interesting because international trades unionists are mounting a major campaign on behalf of their counterparts in Colombia which allegedly has the highest death rate for worker-activists in the world. 

As for the EU Referendum, there was no sign that the NEC was interested in backing those calling for one - both Tories and Labour proponents were being called 'opportunistic'. Labour Party members tend, like Liberal Democrats, to be pro-EU, although there are signs of some shifts in this respect. The rising Compass Left is not yet really represented on the NEC.

Above all, the emphasis is on getting Britain right. The majority of the discussion was about the Government's social programme, the rise of xenophobia and internal party affairs. At one point, it is noted that more building workers die in accidents than British soldiers in Iraq. There is perhaps a complicity here between an exhausted Party and a new Prime Minister in leaving international relations to the State and allow a new concentration on economic stability and social progress.  It suggests a Government with a strong domestic political interest in avoiding foreign adventures and in finding a language that distances without alienating the US. In return for not being the aggressor overseas, the Government wants the Party to trust it more. The current likelihood is that it will.

So, thank you, Ann. Now let us hope that those who use your resource, use it responsibly and that the other main parties come to be equally transparent about their inner workings both to their members and the general public.

[Expression of Interest.  The author is a very passive member of the Labour Party, largely for historical and tribal reasons. He holds no party office. This membership does not affect his judgement in these postings and he is quite prepared to be challenged on bias. In 1996, he was the Co-Ordinator of the CLGF that enabled the election of a number of grassroots candidates to the National Executive Committee but he ceased his association with the grouping no later than 2000. Ann Black has no responsibility for any comments made in this posting and was not consulted in advance. TPPR has received no material that has not been supplied on equal terms to other Party members.]