What a difference a week makes.

In what was surely one of the finest party conference speeches for years, David Cameron, Leader of the Conservatives, showed Gordon Brown how it should be done.

In place of last week’s straining for effect and amateur theatricals, Cameron produced a professional performance of flair and depth of character shot through with real passion. It was also politically and philosophically coherent.

To compare him with Tony Blair — regarded by some as “the master” — is to judge serious accomplishment against fraud and artifice.

No, Cameron must now be viewed as the genuine article, a fully-fledged Prime Minister-in-waiting.

He even managed a rousing peroration, conveying hope and excitement — and more than a few tears from an ecstatic audience in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall.

In a way it was eerily Thatcherite. There was the same scalding sense of challenge and mission, this time social as well as economic. After a period of “detoxifying the brand”, Cameron has moved rapidly onto traditional Conservative territory, daring to contemplate tax cuts while artfully not budging an inch from his earlier concerns.

He promised “sound money”, an end to political correctness, the health and safety neurosis, and, eventually, lower taxes.

A fierce attack on the educational establishment clearly resonated with the audience: there would be an end to the practice of “all shall have prizes” and of deliberate dumbing down. This was heady stuff. A catharsis after eleven years of poisonous frustration.

The Tory theme of the broken society was rehearsed at length. Old-style punishment was blended with concern for the causes of criminality. The work of former leader Ian Duncan Smith was well in evidence.

The speech was compelling not just because of the competent delivery but for its refreshing outlook, and the complete absence of the counter-intuitive nostrums of the Labour government that often sound as if they are made up by half-witted fantasists.

It was noticeable that the biggest rounds of applause greeted the most straightforward expressions of disgust with the present government’s worldview.

I imagine the Prime Minister is feeling rather bruised right now, especially after the tentative improvement in the polls last week.

On this showing, David Cameron can look forward to an even bigger bounce in coming days.

All he needs now is a General Election.

It’s been decided. Gordon must go … painfully.

Such is the extent of his crimes against humanity, the nation, the planet, and especially the Labour Party, the biggest jury ever assembled has decreed he must suffer death by a thousand cuts.

Even the political commentators — who are finding it hard to reinterpret the death throes of this man’s career in new and original ways — were virtually unanimous this weekend on his ultimate fate. Only one that I read put up a lukewarm defence: Peter Oborne in Saturday’s Mail. But there was something weary and attenuated about his piece.

For a more red-blooded approach “Pollygate” takes some beating. The Guardian’s Pollygamous lapdancing correspondent (if Richard Littlejohn is to be believed) was immortalized by parliamentary round-robin, when her extended version of the last rites was circulated by email to every sitting Labour MP. Imagine opening an email and discovering a thousand words by Polly Toynbee on your BlackBerry. Spam doesn’t begin to cover it.

Over at its sister paper, The Observer, Andrew Rawnsley patrolled his now familiar beat, Gordon must go … Oh, the tedium of it.

Turning right into the Telegraph offices, even Gordon’s editor for his new book on “Britishness” (Heaven preserve us!), Matthew d’Ancona, gave the old screw another twist, albeit with just a modicum of concern. Heads and brick walls, Matthew.

Melanie Phillips takes up the baton in this morning’s Mail. It’s a war of attrition now. “The strategy is to undermine Brown by withdrawing support on the Labour benches to such an extent that ministers have no alternative but to wield the knife upon the stricken Prime Minister, and put him and the party out of their misery. … [T]he public is simply sick to death of the whole lot of them.”

The Grim Reaper, it seems, in the person of creepy John Reid, who could teach Vladimir Putin a thing or two, is hovering in the background like a Glaswegian Brutus. He may even decide to stand against Brown. What, another Scotsman? He wouldn’t pass the Paxo Test.

This whole scenario is taking on the form of one of Shakespeare’s more gruesome theatrical extravaganzas. Maybe the party should hire Trevor Nunn as a directorial consultant and be done with it.

In keeping with the theatre noir mood music, Peter McKay talks of Viking funerals, and paraphrases the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Gordon thought he could reap Tony’s seed, keep his wealth, wear the robes he’d weaved and bear the arms he’d forged.”

Not so sure about Tony’s seed though.

Back at the now intensely compelling Guardian, Andrew Marr’s missus Jackie Ashley writes, “The Labour party could be on the verge of destruction. Out of money, and facing an electoral smash and a massive factional fallout, it may not survive as a major political force.”

On Gordon himself she reports, “In private he brims with enthusiasm about child poverty, perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone, and the impact of rising food prices in China.”

Perinatal mortality in Sierra Leone? Says it all, doesn’t it? Out of the mouths of babes and Guardian columnists …

The ever-dependable William Rees-Mogg in The Times has, “Labour’s best hope lies with the Palin effect. Gordon Brown is guilty of boring the nation. His party should look to its women to make itself interesting again.”

But where is a Sarah Palin in the massed ranks of Labour wimmin? The Blair babes are like Gordon, ideological nutcases and social engineers working on the principle that they know best how the rest of us should live, despite the deficiencies in their own lives.

Sarah Palin speaks from real experience learned in the harshest of environments. By contrast, Labour females have the odour of insipid British local government hung about them.

Rees-Mogg revisits his championing of Harriet Harman — Labour’s Hillary — but also adds Ruth Kelly to his shortlist who would swing a bit of interest back towards the Labour Party. I agree, but in both cases it would be accompanied by national derision.

The unsmiling Harman is too frosty and way too feminist, while newly-glamorized Ruth Kelly has a most unfortunate accent that drains her presence of seriousness. An election campaign filled with her drone and Labour’s cacophony of glottal stops would drive us all potty.

Sarah Palin is the nearest America has come to finding a Margaret Thatcher. She explodes onto a stage and holds her audience by the force of her personality and the “wow” effect when she articulates positions that resonate naturally in the minds of her listeners.

She probably reminds Americans of Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau who spoke with folksy common sense in an aura of spirituality. That’s why she’s beating the pants off wonky, cerebral Obama. It’s the psychology, stupid.

Does anyone imagine Harman or Kelly speaking to the British soul as does the Last Night of the Proms?

Margaret Thatcher did. Sarah Palin does in America.

Janet Daley in the Telegraph nails it when she urges David Cameron to begin speaking for the nation. “Shouldn’t the voters be made to feel that there is a prospective Prime Minister who is not playing this game purely for party advantage and is actually prepared to speak up on their behalf?”

Silence is often interpreted as conspiracy.

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Well, that’s the Olympics over for another four years.

What! I hear you say, it’s only just starting? Are you having a laugh?

In modern times, the opening ceremony has become the Olympic Games. The rest is substandard minority sports played out by complete unknowns on behalf of various pharmaceutical companies.

A few score cyclists riding round and round a velodrome — how many know what a velodrome is? The Tour de France is a much greater spectacle.

Meanwhile, half a hundred rowers pull their way down a canal in a park. I don’t think I can stifle this yawn for much longer.

And all those athletes running round a track in pursuit of the big advertising contacts a gold medal will bring. Everyone wants to be a model these days. Whatever happened to real men?

For this, China has turned its capital Beijing into an armed camp, ringed by their version of Patriot missiles, just in case someone somewhere tries to disrupt the event. They have, but it’s in Georgia and it’s the Russians.

I have to admit though, the opening ceremony was without doubt the greatest show ever put on anywhere on the planet at any time. It wasn’t the most tinglingly enjoyable, like a big Royal event in London, but it had more Wow factor than any other comparable bash. It was massive, unremitting — it lasted four hours — and had a machine-like precision that was quite mesmerising.

Pity poor London which has to match that in just four years from now. Can a capital city every bit as ancient as the former Peking dust off its old bones and produce a show as scintillating as the new Emperors of the Middle Kingdom have done?

That is to miss the point entirely. Britain is not a command State like China. The English don’t go in for that kind of mass synchronized eventing. Anyone who has watched our football team knows how unsynchronized we can be.

We’re a nation of individualists who rather resent being pushed around by our rulers. Besides, we are more than a little ironic and prefer our patriotism laced with a great deal of humour. Think Gilbert and Sullivan and you’re on the page.

The problem London has is that its Olympics is in the hands of the same team that brought you the Millennium Dome, the Great Wall of Fire across the Thames that fizzled out like a damp squib, the Millennium Bridge that wobbled so much people were seasick crossing it, and a display meant to highlight 2000 years of British history that included a troupe of Brazilian dancers, snowboarding, an Irish presenter, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Way too much irony!

I refer, of course, to those prize Charlies, New Labour.

Tessa Jowell is the Olympics Minister. This is a lady who has been Minister for “Fun” for donkeys’ years and was demoted to her present position a year ago. She has never run anything in her entire life apart from bits of bureaucratic machinery. Naturally, the cost of Olympic contracts is rising by the week.

Her husband was allegedly involved in bribery scandals with the Italian Prime Minister, and such was the fuss, Tessa had to separate from him, while denying all knowledge of his activities.

Thankfully, London now has a real showman as its Mayor, one Boris Johnson, a chap who knows a thing or two about irony and has actually appeared on game shows. We should also have a different government in 2010, when David Cameron is almost certain to be Prime Minister — he’s 25 percent ahead in the key marginal seats.

Perhaps the most important point is that London can’t be taken over in the way that Beijing has. It’s essentially hundreds of small villages where the old fields in between have been built up over centuries. Many boroughs retain their villagey character. The Olympics will practically disappear when plonked down in that rather dismal part of London hollowed out for the even more depressing stadiums and fun arenas. Like the Dome, there will be no sign of it anywhere that tourists actually go.

I would like to be able to summon up more enthusiasm for this project than I can, but the Olympic Games has become a crashing bore. Only a bigger and more spectacular opening ceremony each time masks the fact that the sport is a sham and the nuts and bolts rusted beyond repair.

The irony is, London is just not capable of that kind of opening show. Amid the disappointment, we may finally realize that this overblown extravaganza is simply not worth disrupting our lives for.

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.