BRITAIN: David Cameron faces into his party's conference with luck on his side, writes Frank Millar, London Editor
After all the plotting and intrigue, Labour delegates left their Manchester conference on Thursday with nothing fundamentally changed or resolved.
Tony Blair took his leave and . . . returned to Downing Street with rumoured intention to remain until next July, and a renewed determination to bring peace to the Middle East before he finally departs.
So what happens now? For starters, David Cameron travels to his conference in Bournemouth tomorrow facing a happier prospect than any Conservative leader for years.
This is not because of the dramatic transformation of his party, the resolution of the membership's anxieties about the new leader's direction, or his spectacular position in the polls. Given Labour's travails a Tory leader on his way to power should be doing consistently better than one poll showing him with support at the magical 40 per cent or above. The UK may be heading in the direction of a hung parliament following the next election.
However, it is not at all clear from current polling data that, given such an outcome, Mr Cameron is certain to be leading the largest party in the next House of Commons.
Many Tories are highly doubtful about the replacement of their traditional agenda with priorities under familiar New Labour-sounding headings about social justice, poverty in Africa, global warming and the environment. Although Mr Cameron was making a serious point, many of his supporters will have recoiled this week on hearing Mr Blair mock his "hug a hoody" response to the government's endless initiatives to crack down on youth crime and antisocial behaviour.
American senator John McCain, who makes a guest appearance tomorrow, may think David Cameron has the potential of a young JFK. Many of the Conservative Party's Atlanticists on the other hand will have winced at Mr Blair taunting Mr Cameron with the charge of "anti- Americanism", while - whether on the Iraq war or the threat posed by Islamic terrorists - many traditionalists fear Mr Cameron does not position himself with the care and foresight of a man expecting one day to find himself making the tough decisions inside Number 10. Moreover, having hated Tony Blair since his arrival, long considered him a phoney and convinced, now, that the country shares their view, there is nagging uncertainty over how a man spoken of as "Blair's heir" might actually perform if and when pitted against Gordon Brown's promised politics of "substance" over "celebrity".
Yet as Mr Blair reminded Labour's conference this week, luck is an essential ingredient in politics. And in the minds of many heading toward Bournemouth, Labour's performance will have only reinforced the suspicion and hope that - whatever about the policies, or the absence of them - Cameron continues to prove a lucky politician.
Barely a year ago he came from nowhere to claim the Tory leadership from the man then seemingly Michael Howard's "assured" successor, David Davis. Twelve months on, he has just watched the Labour Party turn the promise of "an orderly transition" into a potential dog-fight with accumulating damage to the biggest beast in the Labour jungle after Mr Blair himself.
Last week on these pages a Blairite insider dismissed the proffered benign scenario that Labour delegates, and Mr Brown, should simply enjoy what should always have been Tony's party. "The conference will be about Gordon, and not in the way he would have expected," the source predicted.
"The question is whether the doubts about him are bigger at the end of the week than at the beginning." This prompted the conclusion that, if so, it would be instructive to see who picked the fight. And it can hardly be said to have been the Brownites, or the famously brooding, impatiently ambitious chancellor himself.
Mr Brown performed a difficult task well on Monday, only to find his big speech wiped off the front pages by the allegation, officially denied, that Cherie Blair retorted "that's a lie" to Mr Brown's assertion that it had been a privilege to serve under her husband.
While inside the hall Mr Blair defused the tension with that "joke" about not having to worry about his wife running off with the bloke next door, in cold light it merely confirmed Mrs Blair's reported hostility to the man who would succeed him.
Offstage, meanwhile, Peter Mandelson was confiding for the first time publicly that the chancellor had never been able to reconcile himself to not having, won the leadership instead of Mr Blair in the first place.
Other Blairite sources, meanwhile, were briefing that while the chancellor's big speech ticked off the necessary checklist of things he had to say, it had "lacked a narrative". At the same time John Reid was testing himself for the role of credible alternative contender, while Alan Johnson was declaring Mr Blair had "killed" any further attempt to force him out before he is ready to go.
And by close of play many Labour MPs were convinced that not the least of Mr Blair's purpose in staying is to try and block the great friend who became his greatest rival.
But David Cameron will hardly believe his luck that the search for Labour's next leader is to go on and on - with the very real possibility that the hatreds of Labour's two armed camps will provide another massive explosion along the way.