Wait for it

Colourless Ed was engaging but did not exactly inspire his conference audience with his slightly condescending personal insights and careful phrasing. Despite the ovation, it was a speech only made remarkable by an impromptu rebuttal appearance on the Llandudno seafront later in the day by heath secretary Andrew Lansley.

And yet the Labour leader continues to successfully occupy the safe ground, much to the increasing irritation of his opponents.

Welsh Lib Dems and tories are fairly typical of the whining to be heard from wrong-footed strategists who had convinced themselves that Ed Miliband’s election would be a deeply unpopular move. Their projections foretold key strata of electors being instinctively put off by fears of a leftward-lurching puritan Labour party snatching candy off middle-class kids and cancelling Christmas. They were however confounded in their predictions and it is the bleakly focused ConDem coalition, who once heralded such optimism, who have since been transformed into joyless wheel-clampers of hope.

The silent but deadly approach of the Miliband Tendency does not have universal approbation among sections of Old-New Labour where neutrality is considered an alien concept in centre-left politics. But the applause kept coming from delegates nonetheless.

The consensus among journalists who closed their notebooks with an air of unsurprised dissatisfaction at the conclusion of his speech was that - sooner or later - the Labour leader is going to have to say something other than his present stock of anti-government epithets. They also agreed however that he appears to be in no rush at the moment.