Mr John Prescott yesterday brought the curtain down on a Labour conference which, by all conventional benchmarks, was a runaway success. For the third year running the platform carried all before it without suffering a single defeat. Mr Prescott sent the delegates home in reasonably good heart, earning himself a two-minute standing ovation for a speech much devoted to jokes at the expense of the Conservative leader, Mr William Hague.
Mr Prescott scorned the Tory ballot called to endorse Mr Hague's leadership and his programme of party reform. "He's even forgotten that in a leadership election you're supposed to have an opponent," mocked Mr Prescott.
"One member, one vote, one candidate - just William. William is running against nobody. It could be quite a close thing. But either way, let's face it, a nobody is bound to win."
Mr Blair was reportedly irritated by his deputy's display of triumphalism when the conference opened last Monday. Quite apart from offending against the leader's altogether more pious tone, yesterday's comments sit uncomfortably alongside Mr Blair's Tuesday warning that the Tories should not be written off.
Still, a bit of barnstorming is all that's left on the final day of conference. And Mr Prescott's comments were a good deal less personal than those of the Sports Minister, Mr Tony Banks, who gets to keep his job (at least for the time being) after calling Mr Hague a foetus and suggesting that many Tory MPs would be sorry they'd voted against abortion.
Clearly many at the Tribune rally thought Mr Banks hilarious. And opinion remains divided as to which of his remarks caused Mr Blair greatest offence.
Plainly many in the audience were equally delighted by Mr Banks's ridicule of the supremely important Minister without Portfolio, Mr Peter Mandelson (a candidate, surely, for a cabinet post in the reshuffle some say could come as early as next month).
But this bit of a distraction - a gift to journalists struggling to maintain interest in an otherwise controlled and stage-managed affair - also betokened the discomfort of the party generally.
Delegates would patently have enjoyed a good deal more triumphalism. Disobediently, they elected Mr Ken Livingstone to the NEC. And even as they cheered Mr Blair to the rafters on Tuesday afternoon, many were pondering precisely what he meant with his warning that New Labour's compassionate society would come with a hard edge.
Their suspicions were fuelled by Wednesday's "Tory" press, and the cautious hope expressed there that Mr Blair might actually mean to refresh those parts of the welfare state that Mrs Thatcher proved unable to reach.
Most Blair-supporting newspapers were ecstatic enough, leaving it to the London Independent to ask the pertinent question: "Radical, Tony, you may be. But what kind of radical, exactly?"
The kind, perhaps, as reports yesterday suggested, who might oblige people to take out a second pension to top up state provision?
Surely not. After all, that's more or less what the reviled Peter Lilley proposed before the last election!