This week's Brighton experience has proved a slightly strange, vaguely unsettling affair. Five months after its historic election victory, we are still pondering the nature and identity of the creature now known as New Labour. More keenly still, after Tuesday's sometimes messianic performance by Tony Blair, we are left struggling to define the nature, purpose and intent of its creator.
If we were fixated on the mighty Mr Blair before the event, we can only be the more so after a speech in which he declared his intention, no less, to banish the Tories from power for a 21st century he has already claimed for "the radicals".
Maybe it's just the passage of time, but it was hard on Tuesday - and even more so the morning after - to recall a time when anyone, Mrs Margaret Thatcher included, conspired to so dominate Britain's party political landscape, while seeming at the same time to transcend it.
Commentators and sketch writers vied to describe what we had witnessed. The Prime Minister had prudently decided at the last minute to omit a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. But some detected in his appeal for a new Giving Age an attempt to assume her mantle. There were the inevitable Kennedyesque devices. To Camelot's "ask not what your country can do for you" Mr Blair intoned "Now make the good that is in the heart of each of us serve the good of us all. Give to our country the gift of our energy, our ideas, our hopes, our talents. Use them to build a country each of whose people will say that `I care about Britain because I know that Britain cares about me'. "
Speaking against an appropriate backdrop of ecclesiastical purple, this was Blair as spiritual leader, beckoning the nation to a new era of care and kindness, generosity and inclusiveness. No longer would the young go hungry to school, see drugs sold at the gates, congregate in gangs to swear and spit at passers-by. No longer would the old struggle through winter, cold and alone, waiting for death to claim them. Mr Blair would not rest until that country was gone, replaced by a Britain in which no child went without food, the young were employed, and the old cherished and valued to the end of their days.
This gospel according to Tony warmed the hearts of many like Glenys Kinnock, who dismissed the scoffs of a Thatcherite commentator who chided that for every giving there had to be a taking. Mrs Kinnock had no difficulty understanding the meaning of sharing and caring, of duty, that obligation not to pass by on the other side of the street.
There was some mocking, to be sure. And some of it deserved. It seemed a bit rich for Mr Blair to observe that "20 years ago the IMF came to bury us. Now they come to praise us". One recalled a similar line from John Major. And it hardly seemed churlish to observe that the International Monetary Fund was hardly passing judgment on the achievements of Labour, back in office for five months after 18 years in the wilderness.
But the instinct to mock swiftly gave way to a more considered, reflective mood in what still passes for the Tory press. There was quiet hope that Mr Blair might actually be about to reform those parts of the welfare state which Mrs Thatcher had failed to reach.
There was general agreement that much of Mr Blair's speech would have sat comfortably with a Conservative conference. And in the enthusiastic talk of Blair the evangelist, one commentator divined a birth. "To Thatcher, a son" screamed the headline on an article in which Simon Jenkins commented: "Tony Blair gave the best speech Baroness Thatcher never made."
If many of the erstwhile "comrades" winced at sections of their leader's speech on Tuesday, their nagging doubts can only have grown as they read the second and third reflections on Mr Blair's 6,000-word epic.
If they wondered (or feared they knew) what Mr Blair meant by "compassion with a hard edge", they would have found their suspicions confirmed by yesterday's translation in tabloids loyal in turn to Mr Blair and the Thatcher legacy.
Mr Blair's "hard choices" meant something-for-something, nothing-for-nothing welfare reform; increasing personal responsibility for pensions; enforced training for the young unemployed; visits to the job centre for single mothers of children of school age; an end to housing benefit fraud; and a new committee to scrutinise every government policy for its effect on "family life".
He wasn't about preaching to people about their private lives. But this "modern man" bluntly told conference he was addressing a huge social problem: "Nearly 100,000 teenage pregnancies a year. Elderly parents with whom families can't cope. Children growing up without role models they can respect and learn from. More and deeper poverty. More crime. More truancy. More neglect of educational opportunities. And above all more unhappiness."
Roy Hattersley began the week somewhat prophetically, noting how Mr Blair's heart "beats in rhythm with the meritocracy" - the Tory collapse the result of Mr Blair's amazing ability to identify with the upwardly mobile target voter who, five years ago, would not have dreamt of voting Labour.
The Prime Minister was speaking to them on Tuesday as he outlined his vision of a society fired by duties and obligations rather than any notion of the "rights" still dear to the hearts of many Labourites - who this week have reserved some of their loudest applause for the abolition of the House of Lords, the restoration of trade union rights at GCHQ, and, only yesterday, agonised about whether to embarrass the leadership by demanding the re-nationalisation of the railways.
A year from now we shall know if Mr Blair has started to make the hard choices of which he spoke. It will be fascinating to see if conference is still cheering so loudly.