Brown's big day

Today Brown will deliver his first conference speech as Prime Minister, and you can't help but feel the excitement amongst Labour delegates. All the talk is about whether he will call a snap election.

Last night I was at the Social Market Foundation event and had a long chat to John Denham - the minister who notably resigned over the Iraq war in 2003. Now he is in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills. He gave me some very good reasons why Brown might want to call an election sooner rather than later - mostly to do with the amount of money in the Conservative Party war chest.

We talked about the environment and why it wasn't more of an issue for the government. John drew an analogy with the Make Poverty History movement, which took 20 years to make it to the top of the political agenda. Unfortunately, if we wait another 20 years for the climate to get to the top of the agenda we will be too late! The government needs much more urgency on this issue.

Things are much, much busier here than at the Lib Dem conference and many more people are here from business and the NGO community. We have been struck by how many members of the nuclear lobby are here. Last night we found their head of lobbying and had what you can only describe as a "full and frank exchange of views".

Greenpeace is out in force here this week. We have teams of people at every pro-nuclear or energy policy discussion. So they are not getting away with a one-sided debate without some difficult questions from the floor!