If you spend your life reading the greasy chicken McNugget entrails of Westminster, you probably noticed that Gordon Brown mentioned David Miliband just once yesterday.

If you spend your life reading the greasy chicken McNugget entrails of Westminster, you probably noticed that Gordon Brown mentioned David Miliband just once yesterday. You may also have spotted the Prime Minister's intent, too, when he said that a global financial firestorm is "no time for a novice". So: Labour leadership problem solved?

That would depend, as antique radio philosophers once would say, on how you define the question. Mr Miliband had already lost a decade's worth of peculiar, eager, over-promoted ambition, for my money, with a conference speech that counted as the perfect prile: creepy, obsequious and copyright Blairite. If this was last week's serious contender, David Cameron should bet the considerable family inheritance on himself instantly.

Yesterday, Mr Brown had other tasks. The TV opposable thumbs - and Andrew Neil - said it was to be "the performance of his life". In fact, the Prime Minister had painted himself into a corner. He had to convince party, electorate and insane global markets all at once. Even a great Jackie Wilson song intro, and a winning speech from the wife, rarely enable that sort of achievement.

Mr Brown went for the Labour audience, as a first priority. It was a mistake, I think. Better than most, he can make ringing remarks about fairness, children, education, the NHS and global justice. He could almost make me believe in new Labour. But today the bigger audience is asking a far harder question: do you, Gordon, understand what's really, truly, going on?

No-one else does. "Market intelligence" is all over the shop. Learned professors tell me - and why do I doubt? - that "spivs and speculators" have nothing to do with it. The generally-baffled President of the United States has just discovered the joys of wholesale nationalisation. Comrade Bush has seen the light: salud. But Comrade "Red Book" Brown is still dodging the argument.

It was not a bad speech. Had it been delivered a year ago, the Westminster bubble would have bulged and quivered in amazement at Labour's retreat into left-wing probity. The actual remarks did not lack any passion or honesty. I can now get a middle-aged health check: good. If cancer returns to this house, I won't have to write those big prescription cheques: also good.

But if there is a definitive crisis in global capitalism - and never say I said I'd told you so - I tend to expect more from a Labour Party, even this one. Analysis, argument, serious thought: the obvious stuff. That didn't happen.

This is horribly big, and historically - as Mr Brown said - remarkable. Whether the Americans can fund the printing of $700bn to buy banks remains to be seen. Whether fully one-half of all US mortgages can be underwritten by Washington is, as they say, moot.

Whether the next President, of either party, will be bound by a Bush settlement stands as a fascinating question.

Yet Mr Brown did not offer a perspective. He did not say - perhaps wisely - that he can fix things. But neither, aside from some sedative prose on new, grand, global regulation, did he say what he intends to do.

His audience noticed. Party conferences are weird, sickly affairs, stinking with fear and loathing and ambition. When you see the so-called big beasts grow cautious with their applause, however, when you see them sit as a hanging jury, or observe Mr Miliband glad-hand all and sundry, you notice small people become tiny.

The Prime Minister is bigger than his party. That does not render him monumental. Yesterday, he seemed to talk down to a group looking - resentfully, parochially, selfishly - up. I just watched the telly.

Mr Miliband is not an adult alternative. As even the BBC has noticed, finally, Mr Cameron is currently under a deep duvet somewhere: his kind don't do capitalist crises. Nick Clegg's Liberals are, meanwhile, pretending that tax cuts are an appropriate instrument for an economy in which even Bank of England interest rate decisions have become detached from reality. Mr Brown is least worst.

Yesterday, he gave a fine Labour conference speech. That much is true, as in honest opinion. His government spends (lots), we benefit (somewhat) and all of this is a simple moral obligation from a boy who would have been stone-blind had it not been for Labour's NHS. But a speech for a world that has never been in such straits? That was not delivered.

Nationalise, prosecute, penalise, tax or just cast an eye (this is one for older readers) over the commanding heights of an economy? Like his party, Mr Brown has, I think, lost the psychological ability to think in such terms. Mr Miliband would not understand a single word of the sentence. His father, old Prof Ralph, would have blanched, once.

That's neither here nor there. Mr Brown's task yesterday was to give the speech befitting a world statesman. Instead he gave the boilerplate you tend to get, down the years, from any Labour leader in a bit of domestic bother. A few of the smart ones now say the global economy will have to be reimagined utterly after the events of last week - the Chinese, Indians and Russians may have a view - but the Prime Minister would not, or could not, see things on those terms. "Regulation", Mr Brown, was last year.

Think of realities. They will give you a war on terror at the drop of some distressed Chobham armour. A war on domestic economy, on daily life, on people, is beyond them. Peculiar. For a fortnight the TV primates with the working thumbs have been invoking 1929, FDR, a world turned upside down and the state as the invincible last resort for the poor guy who cannot stand such times and live.

Yet when Franklin Roosevelt acted, he did so while in command of the most astonishing economy the world has yet seen. Mr Bush lacks those resources, and then some. Mr Brown will have to borrow big: he should and he must. Yet even that detail gained no mention in an address devoted to "a cause worth fighting for" and "a fair society".

There is a problem, rhetorically, with fairness. Who will you find, do you think, to oppose apple pie? Watching Mr Brown take his long, photo-friendly walk to the Manchester podium yesterday, I was reminded of an interview I did once with Fred Zinnemann. He directed High Noon. That afternoon, the old man was outraged over the fact that the revolting Ted Turner was proposing to "colorize" his monochrome masterpiece.

"I chose to make it in black and white," Fred said. "It's a morality story. It's about one man's choices. It's black and it's white."

British politics, and the Labour Party, has lost the ability to see so clearly. Gordon Brown, least worst, seems to understand the need to recover his sight, but he struggles with the laughter in the dark.

Funnily enough - or not so funny - I cannot find a photograph of David Miliband in which he has forgotten to wear that big, absurd grin. The Labour Party has made some hilariously huge mistakes in its time, but in these grim times that wouldn't even begin to be funny.