91Èȱ¬

On a street corner inside the conference area this afternoon, I came across an old friend, Baron Monkswell, whom I first knew in Stockport 35 years ago when he was just plain Gerry Collier.

Lord Monkswell is one of just 18 or so hereditary peers who support the Labour Party.

He's in Brighton this week, as most years, acting as a conference steward. He wears the usual flourescent yellow stewards' jacket, rather different from the red ermine robes of the House of Lords, where he sat as a Labour peer, until most of the hereditaries were expelled from the house a decade ago.

Monkswell failed to secure election as one of the 92 hereditaries allowed to remain in the upper house. And he failed again at a subsequent by-election (where, absurdly, the electorate was just three people - the three Labour hereditaries who survived after the fourth Labour hereditary died).

Yesterday Gordon Brown told the Labour conference that the "hereditary principle" would be removed from the Lords within the next 12 months. It sounded like a new pledge to expel all hereditaries from the Lords within a year. In fact it merely means the abolition of the by-election system which allows hereditaries who die to be replaced.

Brown's pledge is nothing new. Jack Straw announced it a few weeks ago. So even if the change goes through hereditaries will survive in the upper house until further reform, or they all die out (which could take 50 or 60 years) .

As for Lord Monkswell, he's totally against having any hereditary peers in the Lords, yet he confirms as long as the current system remains as it is, he will contest any by-elections until the system is changed.

So he may have only a few months to get back to the Lords benches. And that will depend anyway on one of the existing four Labour hereditary peers dying, and his winning the subsequent by-election.

The seasoned journalist Geoffrey Goodman has just reminded me that the student used to have a bust of Lenin on his college mantlepiece.

"Why?" his Labour Club colleague, Gerald Kaufman, reportedly asked him.

"My hero," said Murdoch.

The Labour Party conference plays an important role in the Murdoch family. In 1952 Rupert Murdoch, then an active member of the Labour Club at Oxford, visted the Labour conference which followed the party's defeat in the 1951 election.

The conference was held, I think, in Bridlington, and proved to be one of the most acrimonious in Labour history. The young Rupert wrote a long letter back to his father, Sir Keith Murdoch, with a detailed account of all the machinations among the Labour brethren.

Until that point Sir Keith had regarded his son as a wayward character, too interested in horse-racing and gambling, and he feared Rupert would waste his life. The letter persuaded Sir Keith, however, that he'd got it wrong about Rupert - that he would in fact do well in life.

A few days after getting the letter, Sir Keith died, but he died feeling reassured that his legacy was safe. Rupert immediately returned to Australia to run the family newspaper business, and you pretty much know the rest.

Sir Keith Murdoch had been known in inter-war Australian politics as a king-maker, an editor who had made and broken two Australian Prime Ministers. His son Rupert acquired a similar reputation years later, of course, in Britain, through the perceived influence of his Sun newspaper in the elections on the 70s, 80s and 90s. And also as an influential player figure in the politics of Australia and New York.

The third generation of the family, James Murdoch, was in Brighton for a conference reception last night, just as The Sun announced it was ditching Labour and backing David Cameron at the next election.

Will James Murdoch, who is close to George Osborne and David Cameron. prove to be the third Murdoch kingmaker? Downing Street say they are utterly relaxed about the switch - I bet they are.

Many Labour people here in Brighton believe the Murdochs have done a tacit deal with the Conservatives - to promote the business interests of Murdoch, and especially their broadcasting outlets, at the expense of the 91Èȱ¬.

We simply don't know. But there may be another explanation for what's happened, which I don't think one can ignore. That the Murdoch family, like the schoolboy Rupert at the Melbourne racetrack, like picking winners.

So what happened to Gordon Brown's agreement to TV debates, which we thought might feature in his speech yesterday?

I understand he certainly has accepted the idea, and so such debates are now likely to happen. There was quite a last minute tussle amongst his advisers over whether the idea should be included in the speech. The view which prevailed was that such an announcement would dominate the coverage, and overshadow the other important things that he had to say, especially on policy.

So expect more from Brown on debates in the next few weeks.

Mind you, even when Brown publicly accepts the idea, that doesn't yet mean they will happen, even though David Cameron initially challenged him to debate.

The problem will be the detailed format, and especially what to do about the Lib Dems. I can't see the broadcasters accepting a debate with just Brown and Cameron, and the Lib Dems would almost certainly challenge it in the courts.

My solution would be to have no format, and no rules. Just put the three party leaders in a room for an hour or two, cameras rolling from several angles, and see what happens.

Who would dare speak first? Would anybody try to dominate the discussion? It would be just like a few blokes having a heated discussion in a pub, and much more natural.

We would learn a lot more than from from some highly structured discussion, with two minutes of this followed by one minute of that, and chaired by a famous TV presenter.

Everyone agrees that if there are debates for this election they will happen at every election from now on, with the basic format set now.

My fear is that if the debates follow the American pattern they could turn out to be pretty dull, as they often are in the US.

Gordon Brown's pledge to hold a referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) voting system - after the election, if Labour win - may partly be a bargaining chip in the event of a hung Parliament and the need to woo the Lib Dems, who have long wanted proportional representation (PR).

The trouble is that most advocates of PR don't regard AV as a proportional system, and in certain circumstances it can actually produce a less proportional result.

So I rang the Lib Dems twice last night to ask them what they thought of Gordon Brown's pledge.

"We have no comment," they told me, "about a hypothetical referendum in Labour's hypothetical fourth term."

Hypothetical? Aren't all election promises hypothetical? Lib Dem promises more especially.

Nick Clegg did tell the Guardian on Monday, however, that he would welcome a referendum on AV-plus, the more proportional variant on AV advocated by the Jenkins commission some years ago.

So an AV-plus referendum could be the obvious compromise which might see the Lib Dems backing Labour in a hung Parliament.

I stress "might".

Guess whom I bumped into this evening, on his way to the big Labour conference dinner with Gordon Brown?

None other than David Abrahams, the Labour donor who was at the heart of a big scandal a couple of years ago when he was discovered to have given more than £600,000 to the Labour Party through third parties, thereby by-passing Labour's own law which states that large donations to political parties have to be declared publicly.

It seems Mr Abrahams is now back in favour with the Labour Party. After an investigation the police and the Crown Prosecution Service decided not to charge him or any Labour officials.

At least seven times this evening I asked Mr Abrahams whether he was now giving money to the party again, and every time he refused to say. Which might suggest he IS giving money again, in which case his name should soon crop up among the Electoral Commission official figures on party donations.

Unless he's giving money again through other people! Surely not.

The famous story about Peter Mandelson was that he once went into a northern fish and chip shop, spotted the mushy peas on display, and asked for "some of that guacamole".

A total fabrication, of course, from the days when Mandelson was the ogre of the Labour Party.

The real sign of Mandleson's transformation in Labour terms came not with his extraordinary speech and standing ovation in the conference hall this afternoon, but a small scene on the Brighton seafront last night.

A colleague spotted Mandy leaving a chip shop bearing a tray of chips and, yes, mushy peas.

More for show, I suspect, than consumption.

Nick Clegg today told the Lib Dem conference why he wants to be Prime Minister. And he presented his front-bench team, one by one, as ready to take over as Cabinet ministers at the top of a Lib Dem government.

The Lib Dems pride themselves on being a party of honesty, and Nick Clegg's talk today suggesting he's planning to become PM next spring is utterly bogus.

Let's examine the facts.

To form, at best, a minority government the Lib Dems would need at least 220 seats (in the unlikely event Labour and the Tories each got about 210).

That compares with the 63 they have now. In others words, to have a genuine chance of forming a Lib Dem government the party should be targetting between 150 and 200 seats.

That just ain't happening.

In reality, the Lib Dems have so little money and resources that the number of their target seats is probably no more than 50, and in reality may only be about 30. Much of their election effort next spring will be devoted to holding onto what they've got, against a serious challenge from the Conservatives, rather than breaking substantial new ground.

That partly explains the story I wrote yesterday about lots of candidates resigning. Many of them just feel they aren't getting enough support from the high command. (And I was told last night, by the way, by a semi-informed source, that the number of resignations is 23).

The Lib Dems won't say, of course, how many target seats they have, let alone where they are.

The truth will become clearer once we start seeing what seats Nick Clegg visits during the election campaign.

But one thing every Liberal Democrat in Bournemouth knew this week, somewhat to their dismay, is that, as David Steel once suggested, they aren't going back to their constituencies to prepare for government.

The Lib Dems seem to be having a bit of a problem with parliamentary candidates resigning, and women candidates especially. Indeed, the problem is so serious that the party has commissioned two separate reports into it.

One is by by Sal Jarvis of the Lib Dems' English Candidates' Committee. Another report, due next month, is being prepared by the ludicrously named Candidates' Retention Working Party which was appointed this summer by the party president Ros Scott...

Nobody seems able to give me any figures on the scale of the problem, but the existence of two such enquiries shows it clearly exists.

One candidate who has quit, Sally Morgan, who was due to stand in the new seat of Central Devon, has written about it in the latest issue of Liberator magazine.

She complains of lack of support from the party organisation centrally, and from her party activists in Devon.

"Local party members," Morgan writes, "need to be a little bit more compassionate and, dare I say it, liberal! We all like to feel appreciated and you may feel you do a lot for your local party, but no-one does more than the poor bloody PPC. Tell them 'well done' and 'thank you' once in a while."

Liberal Democrats here in Bournemouth tell me its the inevitable consequence of candidates having to juggle work, family and party commitments. And the pressures are all the greater when candidates are having to wait longer for the election than they may have originally expected, with a five-year parliament this time rather than the usual four years.

But one cannot help feeling the resignations also reflect an increasingly stretched party in both money and personnel. That means that in the 500 or so seats that aren't targets, candidates feel they are fighting a losing battle, in many cases almost single-handed.

And perhaps the trend reflects the fact that unlike previous elections the party will do well to hold onto its existing seats next spring, rather than pick up many new ones.