You’ll no doubt have heard that Gordon Brown made another “speech of a lifetime” — that’s the one designed to save his skin — at the Labour party conference yesterday.

It didn’t. One of his most senior ministers, Ruth Kelly, resigned almost immediately, apparently calling it “disgusting”.

A number of Secretaries of State were visibly disgusted too. I saw the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, grimacing and fuming on at least two occasions, while leadership contender Alan Johnson seemed as underwhelmed as it’s possible to be without falling asleep.

What is it with Brown that sucks the joie de vivre out of normally jolly fellows? It could be his utter lack of sparkle, his emptiness of content, the inability to create one line of English that resonates, uplifts and galvanises an audience.

The speech was one long litany of Soviet-style platitudes of the kind that used to come from half-dead men in raincoats and porkpie hats on the Kremlin balcony.

Of course, he doesn’t describe himself like that. He claims to be a free-marketeer and free-trader. This double-edged approach is called “triangulation” — saying one thing to one set of people, while “dog-whistling” something else to an inner clique or clientele.

To make matters worse, he peppered his turgid oration with small, pathetic giveaways to various sections of the population. A bribe here, an inducement there. I wouldn’t have been surprised had he offered free black puddings to university students, or gratis bobble hats to pensioners.

Gordon Brown seems to enjoy presiding over a Father Christmas society, with himself as Santa Claus. It’s a pity that taxpayers have to pick up the bill for his bogus charity.

I won’t comment on the gimmicks in the speech, the one joke, or using his charming wife as cheerleader while pledging he would never expose his family for publicity purposes.

Let’s just say that this speech was the final nail in the boot that will kick him out in due course. It addressed none of the problems of the country — the UK is around a year behind the U.S in the economic cycle. The meltdown on Wall Street and the desperate fight for rescue packages are still to arrive here.

Brown has absolutely no idea what to do about any of it. He’s only interested in protecting his back from his colleagues in the Cabinet, while dismissing any responsibility for the home-grown economic mess.

It’s very hard to be upbeat when writing about Gordon Brown, so I’ll conclude this piece with an apparently true anecdote about a Prime Minister with a similar style to his — let’s pretend it’s him.

The PM is ruminating with friends about his first ever Cabinet meeting as Prime Minister.

“I couldn’t understand it at all,” he said. “They came in and I gave them their orders. Then they wanted to sit down and discuss them.”

It could be, couldn’t it? Actually it was the Duke of Wellington.

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Politicians nowadays speak to us in code. If you still believe that the vacuous utterances of your average politico are nothing but sad soundbites and sugar, think again. The brew is teeming with cipher messages for fellow conspirators.

Currently it’s the crumpled Labour Party that’s responsible for more encrypted signals than GCHQ. Even the political commentators are picking up this irritating habit.

One of the more popular of the code words now doing the rounds is cojones, which is not a type of Welshman. Both Matthew d’Ancona and Andrew Rawnsley used the new “c” word yesterday.

Cojones, pronounced CO_HON_ESS in its native Spanish, has a lot to do with the driving force behind fighting bulls. And I mean behind literally. To be delicate (as we must on a family website), think of our Education Secretary as Ed Cojones. If I also say, two Eds are better than one, you should by now have interpreted my codified intent.

Not surprisingly, the main target in the cojones wars is David Miliband, that prize chump who bounced across our screens last week, grinning like a clown with a painted-on face, on the back of a dreary article in The Guardian. And, yes, the article was seen as so encrypted you’d need an Enigma machine to work it out.

Miliband is sometimes referred to as the British Obama, the Boy David, Millimetre, and, for some reason, even Millinery Hatband. Oh, I get it!

Milly is the cryptic leader of a putative coup against our Gordon, if the signals are read aright. He even answers questions about his dreary “manifesto” in double-code: “can” instead of “will” apparently carries enormous significance with the nerdy types who watch these things.

Variations on the conditional tense are also a big giveaway as in, “I have always wanted to support Gordon”. Meaning, “I haven’t quite got there yet, and it looks a bit late for that now … but I live in hope [Wink].”

Oh, the chuminess of it all. Such ripping fun all round.

Not so for William Rees-Mogg in Sunday’s Mail. After slipping up last week with “the British Obama”, he really gave the lad a smack yesterday.

“Least of all can one sympathise with teenage rebels without a cause who think it would be nice to be the next leader of the Labour Party. They seem to understand nothing about the depth of crisis in which their party and Government find themselves. Grow up or shut up is the best advice to them.”

Such invective is rarely heard from the Somerset Levels.

Liz Jones, also in the Mail, and not normally associated with the cloak and toothpick world of politics, sweetly writes that Milly could be our very own Brad Pitt. Not William Pitt, mind you, but Brad.

There’s only one obstacle to clear. His wife must look like Angelina Jolie. The fact that Ms Jones sets this hurdle, almost certainly means she doesn’t. That must be a great relief to Mrs Milly. I imagine though that Milly himself has enough vanity to rather fancy following in the footsteps of Brangelina.

I think we’ve squeezed all the juice to be had out of Milly’s cojones for one week. However, we do notice that another bandwagon (Milibandwagon? — ah, the composites available to this man) has begun to roll in favour of the other Miliband, Ed — not cojones Ed, you understand. And I’m not suggesting Ed M. doesn’t have what it takes in the boot.

You know, scribbling about British politics can get very complicated. Come back David Cameron (currently in Cornwall), all is most definitely forgiven.

Oh, and bring Occam’s razor with you, along with that big pile of psychology books.

Reading through today’s Sunday papers feels like surveying the aftermath of the battle of the Somme. Around 20,000 British soldiers lost their lives there on the first day alone. A further 30,000 were wounded. Gordon Brown must surely count himself one of the walking wounded after recent events and may even be wondering if he hasn’t died and gone to hell.

He should take heart from those who went before. To historians, desperate situations are more interesting than great victories. They throw up extraordinary characters and tales of heroism against the odds.

Leaders are rarely magnanimous in victory — as Churchill urged them to be. Mostly they lord it up and preen in their assumed glory. A back against a wall reveals more of the moral fibre of anyone than easy accomplishment. Churchill himself is the perfect example.

So what can Brown do now to escape the deep, dangerous hole he finds himself occupying?

He can soldier on, of course, crying out his familiar very-sub-Shakespearean mantras: “Carry on with the job. Long-term decisions. Global solutions. International action … etcetera. He should face up to the fact that oratory and original thought are not his for the taking in this dark night of the soul.

Just hanging on in there, though, is a perilous position for him. It would surrender the initiative to his enemies. In effect he would be placing his fate in the hands of every opponent who has a grudge against him — and there are many.

On the other hand, he could simply resign. Walk away from his troubles as if they never existed. Retire to the life he loves, of books, academia and history.

Ah, history! Wouldn’t it remind him of how little he achieved as Prime Minister, how dismally he is placed in the league table of British leaders? At least Anthony Eden won a general election before he impaled himself on the bayonet of Suez. Harold Wilson won three elections in his long march to the bankruptcy of Britain. Clement Attlee won a landslide victory and didn’t remain long enough to see out the economic disaster that resulted from his Marxist nationalisation spree.

No, Gordon would be rated one of the worst Prime Ministers of all, mainly because he brings his many failures as Chancellor with him. His honeymoon to hopeless clown within 12 months is hard to match in recent history.

That doesn’t leave many options for our unhappy leader, does it? Well, yes, it leaves one. Big, brave and gloriously counter-intuitive, Gordon could confound the lot of us by emulating Marshall Foch.

When French HQ radioed Foch and asked for his position at a crucial battle in World War I, he replied, “My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack.” And attack he did, taking the enemy completely by surprise.

If I were Gordon I would announce an immediate general election. It should be in the minimum timeframe possible — three weeks on Thursday — the Labour Party has no money left to fight an election. Who cares? Who needs useless posters stuck up everywhere? As Prime Minister he would command all the screen time he wanted. Minor expenses could be funded from the few usual suspects remaining, including a couple of friendly unions. The fact that it is August could work for him if he plays his hand astutely.

He would instantly backfoot both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who would not be prepared for an election. He would begin to win plaudits from the papers and political commentators for his “courage” — and not before time. The electorate would grudgingly admire his pluck — a favourite quality for the British. Many would see him anew, and admiration would not be far away. As an underdog, the Brits would line up behind him again in increasing numbers. He would be the talk of the town. Even David Cameron would have difficulty in matching the fighting, no-more-boring Mr Brown.

But would he win? I doubt it. The best he could do would be to claw back some support to deny the Tories the landslide they now see beckoning.

If he could close the gap to a 30, 40, 50 seat majority for the Conservatives, he would be a hero in Left-liberal circles and a formidable Leader of the Opposition. The newly energized Labour ministerial team might clean up against a tentative and inexperienced Treasury bench. David Cameron would be hard-pressed to gain traction for his new administration of which so much is expected.

Of course, Brown could crash out badly and be forced to resign anyway. But at least he would have fought his corner with attempted distinction and gone down in a fanfare of glory. The Charge of the Brown Brigade against impossible odds. The Brits would love it.

That may be the best he can hope for.

America’s Presidential election could be decided by which of the three big isms — racism, sexism and ageism — the country is least susceptible to.

The three remaining runners are a woman, a black man, and an oldie of 71. It’s a bit like the cast of characters in a satirical comic strip. Whatever happened to the seven boring dwarfs of recent memory?

The opening salvo of questions, though, is quite simple :

1. Do Americans want the Clintons back in the White House?
I would wager a big cigar that they don’t.

2. Is John McCain too old?
The country that re-elected Ronald Reagan is not going to be put off by a man of 70.

3. Will America go with Obama’s hard-Left internationalist agenda?
Apart from a few white supremacists, I don’t think this election will turn on race. Obama cuts across many traditional boundaries in the population and has an intellectual stature that suggests it will not. But in the campaign proper, his policies will increasingly be examined.

I understand that Obama has refused to pledge allegiance to his country. The American President is not just a head of government, like the British Prime Minister, but a Head of State, like the Queen. How can a man who refuses to pledge allegiance to his country become Head of State?

His wife seems to have given the game away when she claimed she has never been proud of her country — until now, that is, when she has a chance of living in the White House. In an American context, that could open up a chasm of resentment.

Obama’s policies remind me of New Labour in Britain : high public spending on social services, an internationalism that puts one’s country second, and a creepy social Marxism. As we have discovered, that’s a lethal mixture that progressively destroys the social and economic fabric of the nation.

Policywise, Obama seems to be like all the other Democrat losers of recent times — McGovern, Dukakis, Kerry, etc. In the end, he may well conjure up the same fate.

In a year that’s made for the Democrats, their two, admittedly impressive, candidates are likely to eliminate themselves by recent memories of past imperfections on the one hand, and an excessive zeal for the lost world of the sub-Marx master plan on the other.

This may just leave the field open for the galloping oldie. I must say, McCain would be my first choice if I had a vote. He’s a world away from the Neocon head-bangers who have dominated the White House in recent years, and his policy agenda is one of measured consideration rather than overturning the tables of the temple.

McCain is a genuine war hero. He spent six years in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam under extremes of torture. He won’t send American boys into battle unless it’s absolutely necessary. And, having a simple pride in his country, he won’t precipitately withdraw them either.

Oil was the real story of Iraq, and that essential commodity is still to be fought for. McCain is not going to leave the Middle East to Al Qaeda.

As for his economic policies, they can’t possibly be worse than Obama’s or Clinton’s — or even the strange excesses of George W Bush.

His master stroke would be to declare that he expects only to stand for one term because of his age — but will consider his options toward the end of a first term. He might also pick a genuine Presidential figure as his running mate in case of accidents.

My guess is that he will win in a tight finish. But not so tight that we again become absorbed by the hanging chads of Florida.