THOSE who recall Labour's annual conferences as cockpits of highly-public and embarrassing conflict were given a sharp snapshot of how much the party has changed when, against a background of rumoured rift between him and Tony Blair, Chancellor Gordon Brown gave a barnstorming performance that won the Prime Minister's enthusiastic applause - but also underscored his own capability as a potential leader.

But if the Blair-Brown show of unity that went with it was designed to put a damper on the reports of a split, the sparkling speech by Mr Blair's next-door neighbour in Downing Street could still be seen as an eventual application for the Prime Minister's job.

For it was not only a display of how rounded Mr Brown has become as a politician - no longer dour, but confident and even smiling and, above all, able - but how ideal he is as the heir to No.10 in that he would deliver a seamless succession as a New Labour leader.

The Chancellor had plenty to offer yesterday by way of proof of his proficiency - low inflation, low interest rates and plunging unemployment - and was even able to dangle before the conference the prospect of the old socialist holy grail of jobs and prosperity for everyone within a generation.

Yet, the distinction between the old Labour rhetoric and Mr Brown's was to be found in how this was to be delivered - not with pumped-up public spending and taxation, the method that used to be the ruin of Labour's fiscal credibility with the taxpayers, but with self-help and responsibility and unbridled free enterprise.

There would, he said, be no going back to the old ways of managing the economy. Never again would Labour be the party that was anti-success, anti-competition, anti-profit or anti-markets. And, who, in that old era of conference delegates spouting the very opposite, would ever have imagined a Chancellor of the party that built the welfare state, pledging that a job for everyone would mean no dole for the workshy who repeatedly refused one?

The contrast between the old and new - and the evidence of how far Blairism has gone and of Mr Brown's own commitment to it - was also seen in the call by ex-social services minister Barbara Castle for the restoration of the link she created in 1974 of state pensions with earnings, a tie the Tories scrapped soon after coming to power and replaced by connecting pensions with prices.

Pensioners had each been robbed of £30,000 in the interim, complained Lady Castle. A veritable icon of the Welfare State built and nurtured by old Labour - with the introduction of child benefit to her personal credit - she was given a warm reception by delegates.

But if she did not stress how much restoring the link would cost - £8 billion a year extra by the end of the next decade - or dwell on where the money would come from, the new Labour minds in her audience evidently did. For her cry went unheeded as delegates voted instead for the government's welfare reform policy.

As this vote and the sound-money tenor of Mr Brown's speech clearly showed, Labour has indeed changed - and immensely so.

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