The British Chancellor, Mr Gordon Brown, yesterday staked his authority and the Blair government's re-election on a robust rejection of Tory "short-termism" and a call for a "great national debate" on tax and spending.
At the same time he rekindled speculation about his own ambitions, setting out a vision of a government of enterprise ending child and pensioner poverty and delivering full employment - challenging the delegates to "higher efforts" to win "a new mandate for a purpose".
Shrugging aside continuing controversy over the Ecclestone loan affair, Mr Brown issued a rallying cry which delighted the faithful and won him a protracted ovation which ended only when his wife Sarah joined him briefly on the platform.
In a defiant performance the Chancellor set out to defuse a pensions revolt - promising tax credits and transitional arrangements targeted at low- and middle-income pensioners.
While rejecting the central demand of protesters who gave ministers a rough ride yesterday - for the restoration of the link between pensions and earnings - Mr Brown hinted at a possible increase in the basic state pension, promising more money than would be delivered by either an earnings- or inflation-related increase.
However, if the Chancellor appeared to have done enough to stave off a threatened conference defeat for the platform on pensions, he had little comfort for the hundreds of farmers and road hauliers protesting outside the conference centre.
Having fought at the IMF in Prague on Sunday for agreement between oil-producing and oil-consuming countries that production had to increase and that prices must come down, he said he would report again on this issue in his budget report and in the budget itself.
However, to warm applause from the delegates, the Chancellor declared: "This national debate is too important to ever be decided by those who shout the loudest or push the hardest. The British way, the Labour way, is that every voice must be heard."
Hailing Labour's willingness to set "priorities" and make "tough decisions", he said it was right that the government should target tax cuts on the country's priorities and in future budgets to target tax cuts again: "But what we rule out is blanket irresponsible tax promises that cut into the £4 billion extra investment in transport, the £12 billion in education and training, the £14 billion in health. We will not put the long-term future of our public services at risk."
He continued: "For however difficult the decisions we have to make, the country will never forgive us if we lurch from one opportunist tax decision to another and retreat to the old short-termist ways of the past."
Setting out Labour's second term stall, Mr Brown concluded: "They said in one term we could never simultaneously create stability, one million jobs, abolish 800 hereditary peers, create devolution for Scotland and Wales, a minimum wage and take a million children out of poverty. We have. Now they will say we cannot achieve our priorities: full employment, abolish child and pensioner poverty, build world class public services, prosperity for all. I say we can and will."