The Labour Party this year almost certainly held its last annual conference at Blackpool. After 70 years in which this working class English resort was the venue of choice for the working man's party, Blackpool is now out of step with "New Labour."
Party veterans like to joke that Labour and Blackpool are as inseparable as fish 'n' chips. With its miles of amusements arcades, severe landladies and "world famous" illuminations, Blackpool's cheerful tackiness defines the English working class at play.
In its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, the town played host to entire suburbs of working class families from nearby Manchester and Liverpool on holidays. And since 1927, Labour has held the majority of its conferences in this corner of north-west England.
"Blackpool is the most authentic gathering place of parties of the left anywhere in Europe," said one delegate, Mr Denis MacShane MP. "I always stay in small boarding houses and I learn more in a week about the heartbeat of the UK than in a month in the Commons."
But Britain's premier holiday town is out of tune with the sophistication of "New Labour". Mr Blair holidays in Tuscany and the south of France.
Next year, the Labour conference will be held in Bournemouth, and the year after in Brighton. No decision has been taken for the years after that but party officials admit privately that a return to the north-west is unlikely.