There's a handy discipline to British political parties' habit of gathering every September in gloomy seaside resorts for national conventions. Every year, each leader has to tell his party and a national audience who he is and what he wants. No way to cancel, nowhere to hide. Canadian party members, living in a country 42 times as large as Britain, can't meet nearly as often. Our politics is weaker for it.

Tony Blair famously chafed at most of his 13 Labour conference speeches. He never believed Labour understood him. He resented having to try to explain. But if ever there was a man of discipline, Gordon Brown is it. On Monday in Bournemouth, the lifelong Labour man faced his party for the first time as prime minister. He met this task as he meets most these days, diligently, dully, but without a misstep.

Brown is good at making dull diligence a virtue. Quite by coincidence, his first three months as leader have been unsettling times for Britain. But people have managed, and he makes managing Britain's virtue. "Tested again and again, the resilience of the British people has been powerful proof of the character of our country."

Car bombs, floods and pestilential livestock have tried the nation. "Our response was calm and measured. We simply got on with the job. Britain has been tested and not found wanting. This is who we are."

Of course he was being autobiographical. Gordon Brown has been tested -- not seriously, not by strikes or tragedy or by any war he didn't inherit from Blair -- but tested by a transition of power, which was all Paul Martin needed to come apart. Brown, Canadians may therefore be surprised to learn, has not been found wanting. On the weekend, to be precise, he was found eight points up on David Cameron's worried Tories. There has been speculation about a snap election this fall, two years into Labour's mandate. Early elections are far less common in Britain than Canada. Brown neither feeds nor kills the speculation. He tells interviewers he is simply "getting on with the job." Like Britain.

Blair hated giving conference speeches but he was brilliant at it, really brilliant. Some day, when the details of the moment are forgotten, students of rhetoric, if any are left, will still be studying Blair's speeches. "Let us step up the pace," he said in 1999. "Be confident. Be radical. To every nation a purpose, to every party a cause. And now, at last, party and nation joined in the same cause, for the same purpose: to set our people free." It was gorgeous. Brown said nothing like it on Monday.

But after a decade, Britons noticed they felt little about their country to match Blair's shiny words. It is constantly amazing to read how sick Britain is of Blair, or at least those Britons who write for the papers, left and right, even today. Probably it's not fair. Probably it won't last. But it is starting to seem a strategic error for the Tories to have turned to Cameron, who is young and sunny and wants to be liked. A Blair-like leader just as the Blair brand turns sour.

Brown isn't Blair. But neither is he Paul Martin. He let his predecessor pick his own departure date. He hasn't felt the need to purge the party of its old guard. He is so sure of who he is that he needn't go on about who he isn't. Amid the election speculation, his conference speech did not even mention Cameron, the Tories, or the third-party Liberal Democrats.

The job he wants to get on with is familiar in its outlines, but not less worthy for that. He sees educational opportunity as the best expression of fairness and the best tool for competitiveness -- the old Labour value of equity and the New Labour imperative of hard-headedness in a single package. "The country that brings out the best in all its people will be the great success story of the global age," he said. So he'll hire more tutors for elementary school, extend free education from age 3 to 18, increase grants for low-income university students(while keeping tuition fees high for those who can pay -- the right mix).

Tony Blair's entourage used to worry Brown would take Labour back to the hidebound trade unionism of the 1970s. Not a chance. Brown is ostentatiously tough on crime, as any leader who wants to win elections anywhere seems to be. He wants to make knowledge of Britain's language and culture a condition of immigration. He wants to be a "good European" but he speaks only of the limits he will put on European encroachment. He will never say the Iraq war was a mistake but he talks about it a lot less than Blair did. This is a dodge, but more elegant than the dodges our prime minister would have to make on Iraq, if anyone ever troubled him with the question.

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