But the Tories had their own ammunition: women had not been vocal at the Labour Party conference either; and half the 2,000 Tory delegates, but only 60 of the 1,100 Labour delegates, had been women.The Tory organisation, however, was worried by the passivity of the women members, and during the Twenties it refined conference arrangements to ensure that women would always comprise at least half the number of lay delegates.But while the Tories were extending women's presence within the party, Labour was still controlling it. Throughout the Twenties, Labour re-enacted a ritual tournament between the organised interests of men and women.The battle took place over women's reproductive rights. Annually, the Labour women's conference vigorously endorsed working-class women's access to contraception - and annually, at the full party conference, the women's wish was bombed out by the trade union block vote, aka the men's vote.It was the Tories who intuited that women were too important to leave to the goodwill of men and, more than that, the party's future was too fragile to leave to men. They had already learned that their survival as a modern mass party had been secured by women. A century ago the party structure was thin, centralised and clubby - not the machine they needed to engage the newly enfranchised male masses. But the party was rescued by the Primrose League, a spectacular mass movement, raunchy and glittering, which proved to be women's passport to the hustings, and marked their metamorphosis from hostesses to activists.In the post-war politics of consensus, women became the mutinous mob of Toryism.

And the agenda in which they asserted themselves was law and order.In the Eighties, when Labour attempted to steal the Tories' law-and-order thunder, the party's campaign was anchored almost entirely in women's experience. How odd, then, that Mr Blair's campaign on law and order has not advanced that gendered initiative. He has neither exposed the equation between crime and masculinity nor, in his appeal to community, has he created an alliance with women, who, everyone knows, form the spine of community self-help and active citizenship.Labour's obsession is electability, but it still does not seem to see the connection between women and winning. The party used to think it could win with working- class men. Now it seems to think it can win with the men of the middle class. What it doesn't know is how to win with the women of all classes.. BLACKPOOL.

There was a curious lassitude about the opening sessions of the Labour conference. Torrents of hot language spouted from the faith healers of the Winter Garden, but the reaction from the delegates was oddly cool People here are watching, waiting, unsure There is no joy about. In a week which sees National Versification Day, it is worth noting that the Labour Party lacks poetry. There is no sense of what the reformer-rogue John Wilkes called 'the generous plan of freedom', no convincing word-picture about life feeling different, doors opening and great possibilities being unlocked after 15 years. Here, the vivid and self-assured speakers tend to be those, like Benn and Scargill, who are stuck in a timewarp from which there is no escape; the forward-looking speakers tend to sound dull and mechanical. Party bookstalls are another indicator of inner life: Labour's one is sentimental-historical in tone, stuffed with novels, accounts of early and heroic trade- unionism, and biographies of men who never quite made it to office. Tony Blair has accomplished a lot in a short time, but the overriding impression is of how much remains to be done. A bit of economics here, constitutional reform there, but nothing so far brings it together in the 'New Britain' of the conference slogan.

There is satire about Tory failure, but there isn't a vision We still have Labour We don't, any longer, have Albion. This is odd, because there is a job for the party which is awesome in scale, and certainly as big as anything it faced during its heyday.Almost every management guru seems to foresee a world divided into roughly three groups. At the top there will be a relatively small group of highly-qualified, hyperactive high-earners burning themselves out as participants in the global economy. Then comes the mass of less-qualified workers, increasingly competing against their Asian and Eastern European rivals, earning low wages and with little hope of bettering themselves. And below them is the underclass, or what we are now invited to regard as 'the new rabble'.