Conference speeches are always exaggerated in importance. They rarely win hearts and minds and are rarely remembered for long when they are half-decent but they are long remembered when they are unmitigated disasters. William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Gordon Brown all publicly self-harmed from the platform. Ed Miliband’s priorities for today would have been first to avoid disaster, second to avoid further hostages to fortune, third, to raise the right questions about Labour’s fall from power, fourth, make set out his personal narrative and finally to put down some markers for future policy. In those terms the speech made sense.

Steve Pound, the MP for Ealing Someplace, praised the speech in entirely over the top terms giving it “ten plus out of ten”. You have to give Steve ten plus for complete and total loyalty with a cherry on top. Bless. Every Party needs a Pound.

But what really happened?

If I were a new party leader with a reputation for being somewhat, well, nerdy, I’m not sure if I would have wanted to walk onto the stage to a Vampire Weekend track, but as an exercise in personal positioning Ed Miliband’s wasn’t bad

Most importantly, for someone talking about “a different kind of politics” he resisted the temptation to take the easy route of trashing the Liberal Democrats. Both Labour and Conservative activists love having the Liberals trashed. Trashing the Liberals is easy, it’s fun, it makes the audience happy, but it doesn’t win new friends or win elections. It was also thankfully free of personal trashing of Conservative Ministers – which is also fun, the conference audience adores and is, after all, really easy. He can leave that stuff to Ed Balls. Instead he kept it political, challenging the coalition on common sense areas where spending cuts are most obviously counter productive.

That, of itself, is important. David Cameron has, by and large, kept it political and has been given some credit for it. Ed Miliband is not the greatest of platform orators but he was able to inject some self-deprecating humour, which always helps. But oratory isn’t everything and after three years of Gordon Brown ranting through his shopping list Ed’s more relaxed style was a positive relief. Some of the speech was lifted, more or less, from his stump speech during the leadership campaign and, as a result, the flow of themes from one section to the next lacked some fluency, but, having created something of a problem for himself with some of his campaign positions, he pulled off good transitional statements to being re-positioning. He also put markers down in a number of areas where the Party could easily fly off into opportunism – like saying that he would be voting YES in the AV referendum (as will I) and others where he sought to open up debate on future policy by asking the right questions.

He tried to draw a line under Iraq – the yet to report Chilton enquiry means it won’t be the last word just yet. Nonetheless, his ability to move Labour on a generation means he can, more easily, put the issue behind the Party. But when Ed asks the question “why did Labour lose 5 million votes between 1997 and 2010″ the answer is most definitely ‘not just because of Iraq’. Indeed the biggest fall in Labour’s vote was the 2.7 million that slipped away unnoticed from 1997 to 2001 when the Party achieved a second landslide. This was also the period in which most of the New Labour achievements Ed highlighted were implemented.

To be fair, it was not Ed’s answer. He said instead, “We became trapped by our own certainties. We lost our ability to change and think new ideas in Government.” In other words we failed to re-invent ourselves. Re-invention in Government is, of course,

In saying this, consciously or otherwise, Ed admits the single biggest failing – that the party became trapped into trying to re-invent itself by anointing a leader who stood for more of the same and who took, in fact, took Labour backwards into a socially illiberal, fiscally unsound, statist mire. Who stopped understanding that “putting and end to boom and bust” was fine as a statement of economic aspiration but that claiming it had been achieved was the height of hubris. The Leader who never was. Ed Miliband’s speech was massively important in distancing himself from his former boss. Being seen as Brown’s man is the one thing that could be even worse than being seen as a creature of General Secretaries.

As for the notion of ‘moving the centre’, this is just a little trite. That’s what we do in politics – we seek to move the centre. That’s what new Labour was about and that’s what New Labour did. It was what Thatcher did, it is what the Cameron is seeking to do. Moving the center is easier when you are in Government, in fact it may only be possible from Government.

There is still much to do. Recovering economic credibility will require a great deal more than a statement of basic Keynesian principles and chest beating about the absence of a UK industrial strategy – a governmental failing seemingly since the dawn of time. No doubt Mr Cameron will use some line about ‘Britain doesn’t need cock-eyed optimism, it needs hard headed realism’, but, hopefully, Milliband E has understood that Labour wins when it is about modernising the country.

So not the finished article, but as a first leaders’ speech not a bad start at all. Didn’t mind his tie either, nice colour, though the shirt collar was wrong for his neck. Some styling is required. Still, elephant traps avoided – for now.

Whether Labour has made a viable choice or a profound mistake is not yet clear. New recruits and instant bounces are so much fluff. But we’ll know soon enough. PMQs – now that will be interesting.