PADDY ASHDOWN has damned it "a conspiracy of deceit" - the greatest, perhaps, perpetrated against the British people in the past half century.

The all star political production gets under way this morning with the Blair/Prescott players in the faded splendour of Blackpool's Winter Gardens. Next week the Tory troupers take centre stage at the ultra modern Bournemouth Conference Centre.

For the next fortnight the punters will hear conflicting yet remarkably similar refrains. Britain stands on the edge of a new era . . . on the brink of exciting opportunity ... called, no less, to shape and define the politics of a new millennium.

The air will fill with talk of challenge and vision, of rights tempered always by responsibilities, of civic pride and true patriotism. Mr John Major will draw on history to promise Britain's continuing greatness. Mr Tony Blair will offer fresh greatness - the prospect of a country reborn, a new Britain, a young Britain ... though nobody seems to have a clue what that might mean.

For the poor and dispossessed there will be the promise of work, not welfare. To meet the challenges of the global market, alienated youth will be offered a new world of raining and re skilling. Education will be the top priority. Health service waste will be slashed. Young offenders will tremble before the law. The streets will be made safe . . . a green and pleasant land restored, fit for upwardly mobile, high achieving citizens who understandably and rightly complain that the state claims too much of their purses.

Mr Major, of course, will try to raise the fear factor. But Mr Blair knows where the dangers lie. He can be expected to "reassure" a nervous Robin Cook, his shadow foreign secretary, that "the bottom 30 per cent" won't be left behind. But shadow chancellor Gordon Brown is determined to frighten no section of the tax paying society, not even the handful earning more than £100,000 a year.

In the aspiration stakes, "New Labour" is as determined as the Tories to reduce the tax burden when it is prudent.

Mr Ashdown may charge the Prime Minister with doubling the national debt, and forecast a public spending crisis within a year of the general election. The IMF can warn the Chancellor, Mr Kenneth Clarke, to reduce the deficit, again casting serious doubt over whether he can "afford" tax cuts in his November budget. But expect no scare stories out of Blackpool or Bournemouth.

Sure, there will be tussles over detail. But Britons, it seems, can expect high quality public services and a falling tax bill. Unreconstructed lefties may bring their pet spending projects to this week's conference. But would be chancellor Brown will hammer home the message you save before you spend and "Old Labour's" tax and spending habits are a thing of the past.

The fear that this is so prompted one senior Labour MP recently to suggest there was no reason why Ken Clarke should not remain at the Treasury in a Blair led government.

He was only slightly joking. And the barb revealed the depth of anxiety within traditional Labour ranks about where the Blair project is headed, and what, if anything, it amounts to.

On Europe, Mr Blair chides Mr Major for a "lack of leadership." This week he will have perfectly legitimate fun with Tory disarray and division over the European single currency. He will lament "the loss of Britain's influence" as Germany and France push ahead toward monetary union. He will mock Mr Major's "wait and see" approach. And he will then commend exactly the same policy on the currency to Labour and the country.

On one of the greatest issues to confront the British people - with its undoubted constitutional and political implications - Mr Blair is no more ready than Mr Major to come clean. Likewise, his determined "safety first" approach is already defusing the excitement promised by his pledges on constitutional reform.

Mr Blair is committed to abolish hereditary peerages but will not follow Mr Ashdown's plan for an elected second chamber. Blair's modernisers quake at the very idea that even that limited tampering with the hereditary principle could have implications for the monarchy.

The "New Labour" leader seems agnostic about voting reform. And his U turns on Scottish devolution would seem to have raised formidable obstacles in the way of a Scottish parliament with tax raising powers.

All of which explains the curious lack of excitement which attends this week's "coronation" conference. In a withering editorial, yesterday's Independent on Sunday suggested it might even prove to be "the pinnacle" of Mr Blair's career. The danger was not that he might fail at the electoral hurdle, but that his sad fate might be to join those others "who occupy Downing Street for a very long time without anybody being quite able to remember what they did."

With seven months to go to the general election this will strike many as an extraordinary and premature judgment. But there is at least an argument that little real courage or boldness has been required from Blair, given a quiescent party gutted by four election defeats and desperate for power.

And the suspicion is now widespread that "if he sweeps into power, it will be because he has tapped into Middle England's yearnings for the certainties of a bygone era: old fashioned schools, traditional nuclear families, policemen on the beat, secure jobs, communities where people cared about each other. He speaks, as Martin Jacques has put it, to the angst of the age."

In doing so, and in embracing an increasingly conservative agenda, Mr Blair compounds the angst of those who, come polling day, will be tasked to bring out the vote.

"We're becoming indistinguishable from the Tories", rails Dame Barbara Castle. So much so, according to MP David Hinchcliff, that core voters are asking what is the point in voting Labour? Fuel led by the debates of the past fortnight about the trade union link and the meaning of socialism, many of the comrades (sorry) will be asking if Mr Blair sees them as a Labour party at all - and fear they know the answer.

BUT, for the most part, they will struggle to keep their darkest fears to themselves. There may well be squalls in Blackpool this week - over pensions, employment rights, child benefit, rail ownership and defence spending. But even at this writing the modernisers are locked in smoke filled rooms with trade union leaders, charting the path to a relatively trouble free week for the leadership.

And, anyway, the idea of conference as sovereign has already been junked. Mr Blair will simply ignore any conference decision he doesn't like. Conference may not like that - but it will lump it. Tony Blair is their only ticket to power. But neither his party nor the country at large has yet much sense of what he will do with it.

Maverick MP Austin Mitchell says the marketing men will win the election for Labour, but the party won't know where it will be when it gets there. "Blair's not an instinctive egalitarian. He's not a natural friend to the trade unions. He's beamed in from outer space.

Yesterday's Sunday Telegraph was more kind. Understanding that Mr Blair must this week try to be "all things to all men", the paper said deft conference management could not be confused with readiness for office or clarity as to what life in Blair's Britain would be like: "The chameleon has yet to show his true colours."