We are the optimists, and David Cameron has a challenge on his hands

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk

Ed Miliband is now the leader of the Labour Party. This might sounds like a strange thing to say – after all he was elected over 72 hours ago, but today was the true birth of Ed Miliband Labour leader, and on this performance, Labour’s next Prime Minister. After the shock of Saturday, the party has now adapted to the new reality – Ed is the one we follow, and today, he led.

That’s not to say the speech was perfect – Ed didn’t hit all of his marks – but crucially this was the “hello world” speech. After four months of the Labour Party seeing him at close quarters it was time for Ed to address the country. The work had begun on Saturday, and the stand out line from that speech became the refrain of today’s speech – “The Next Generation”. The mood in the hall was good, but they weren’t the audience Ed was gunning for here.

Jokes peppered the early stages of the speech which removed a lot of the tension in the room. Then he moved on to his family, a story that has been told and re-told so many times, but usually only in passing whilst discussing his father’s political views. What is often forgotten about Ed (and David) is that he is the son of immigrants, who came to this country to flee the Nazis. It humanised the Miliband family, and moved them from myth to reality. It also allowed Ed to pay tribute to his brother in a way that was fitting, whilst also covering the ground in the speech.

His thoughtful and considered thanks to the departing members of the party’s old guard allowed him to be both complimentary to the New Labour legacy, whilst clearly drawing a line in the sand – the party has changed, and we need to move on. Already by this point it felt that the mood was moving with him, and that is when the real substance began.

In many ways this was the ideal speech for Ed to have given. LabourList’s Anthony Painter perhaps summed this up best when he tweeted during the speech,

“Civil liberties, foreign policy, civil society, political reform, growth….tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.”

It was a checklist of goodies alright, not for the party as such, but for the country at large. As the speech gathered pace in the second half an Ed really got into his stride, next generation fighting optimism for the mantle of Ed’s key soundbite. The upbeat message resonated in the hall – here was a leader, and a party, unafraid to say what they believe in, and campaign on that basis because we know that we stand at the centre of British politics, not on the left or outside the mainstream.

And then, in the final moments, the line that got the biggest applause of the afternoon “Red Ed? Come off it.” Ed had taken on the ludicrous insinuations of recent weeks. The cheap attacks intended to bring him low. The smear that the right hope will be their label for our man. And he turned it against them, dismissed it out of hand as the nonsense that it is.The crowd loved it.

Stories began to reach me as I stepped outside of the conference centre, into the buzz and hum of excited conversation, of David Miliband supporters in the hotels and bars both inside and outside of the secure zone. They hadn’t got tickets to the speech, but they still wanted to watch. At first they were sceptical, even critical, then they began to applaud. And in the final seconds of the speech, hundreds of yards from the conference centre, supporters of David, so long in direct competition with Ed, so saddened by Saturday’s events, stood up and applauded their new leader.