In his last conference speech before the nation decides, the Prime Minister appealed to voters not to turn the next poll into a referendum on his leadership, acknowledging his continuing unpopularity in opinion surveys.

"The election to come will not be about my future. It’s about your future, your job, your home, your children’s school, your hospital, your community. It’s about the future of your country."

For the second year running, he was introduced to the conference by his wife Sarah, who described him as "my husband, my hero".

Aligning his government with the "hard-working majority, not the privileged few", Mr Brown urged his party to "never stop believing" and in a defiant message declared: "Since 1997, Labour has given this country back its future. And we are not done yet."

He unveiled a raft of proposals in an attempt to show his party had not run out of political steam.

The PM responded to the furore over Westminster expenses with plans to shake up the democratic system, including a new power for constituents to recall misbehaving MPs, a referendum on introducing the Alternative Vote for general elections, whereby candidates have to get 50% of the ballot to win a seat, and a commitment to a "democratic and accountable" House of Lords.

He vowed that during the next Parliament ID cards would not become compulsory and that the minimum wage, child benefit and child tax credit would be increased every year.

There was a raft of eye-

catching promises for a fourth Labour term on social policy.

These included a crackdown on antisocial behaviour, new powers for councils to ban 24-hour drinking in their areas, "tough love" intervention for the 50,000 most difficult families, police action squads to tackle disorder in the run-up to Christmas and swifter cancer diagnoses.

However, all of these would apply to England and not to Scotland.

Indeed, Mr Brown mentioned Scotland only once during his hour-long address, attacking the "narrow nationalists" of the SNP; he spent most of his fire power on David Cameron’s Tories.

He said: "The Conservative Party want people to believe that the ballot paper has an option marked change without consequence; that’s it’s only a change of the team at the top.

"They’ve done their best to conceal their policies and their instincts but the financial crisis forced them to show their hand and they showed they had no hearts."

The Prime Minister’s speech left the conference delegates buoyed, but opponents were unimpressed.

Eric Pickles, the Tory Chairman, denounced it as "just a long shopping list with no price tag", while Angus Robertson, the SNP’s Westminster leader, branded it "a desperate last throw of the dice".