Fraser Nelson

What’s Ed Miliband about? In a word: socialism. You can think this a good or a bad thing, but there ought to be no doubt about where he stands. At a Q&A in the Labour conference last night, he was challenged by an activist: When will you bring back socialism?' 'That’s what we are doing, sir' Miliband replied, quick as a flash. 'That's what we are doing. It says on our party card: democratic socialism'. It was being filmed, and your baristas at Coffee House have tracked down the clip as an exclusive. This little exchange will perhaps tell you more about Ed Miliband and his agenda than much of the over-wrought character-spinning stunts you can expect to see this week. It was no slip of the tongue.

'Labour plans have a £27 billion black hole,' says the Sunday Times, quoting  analysis from George Osborne's Treasury.  If true, that’s the first piece of good economic news we’ll have heard from Labour. Osborne’s black holes have been way, way bigger – well over £100 billion so far. In his excellent new book about journalese, Robert Hutton offers this definition of black hole: 'A point in space so dense it creates a gravitational field so strong that not even light can escape. Or, in newspapers, a gap. Especially in finance, where it typically refers to any funding shortfall over £1 million.' Parties love casting a slide rule over each other's policies, declaring that they don't add up and use phrases like 'black hole'.

Three years ago, just two lonely journalists turned up to the UKIP annual conference. This year, they have accredited 150 of them. Now Britain’s third-largest party (it has led the LibDems in the polls since March) Nigel Farage positions himself as an insurgent whose message is so incendiary that the mainstream would not dare to broadcast it. Today was his chance. The UKIP conference is getting plenty coverage on BBC Parliament Channel, a huge chance. And one that was not really taken. We’re used to seeing Farage with a pint and fag in hand, looking mischievous and raising hell. Today he looked fretful and sweaty. He didn’t use autocues -  which is fine, neither does David Cameron when things get sticky.

David Aaronovitch's column in The Times today (here) is fairly devastating for Ed Miliband. He’s angry about the Syria vote, but this has crystalised his misgivings about the character of the man who would be Prime Minister. Miliband could have accepted Cameron's motion and taken credit for getting proper process established, he said. But instead he chose to exploit and scavenge. It was said of Gordon Brown that he was a destructive force, and could not build - as Blair had built. Aaranovich gives an even worse verdict for Miliband: he's so hopeless that cannot even destruct. He just waits for people to fall into trouble, and then swoops. He wouldn’t outline his own alternative strategy — he’d just defeat Mr Cameron’s.

When seeking election, both David Cameron and Barack Obama promised to seek a vote before going to war. Until an hour ago, it seemed that the Prime Minister was as good as his word but the president was not. His decision to follow Cameron's example and consult Congress has stunned Washington, not least because popular support for a missile strike is even lower in America than in Britain (about 20pc). So what helped shift opinion in Washington? Obama did not attempt to disguise it. Those asking him to recall Congress, he said, were... "undoubtedly... impacted by what we saw happen in the United Kingdom this week when the Parliament of our closest ally failed to pass a resolution with a similar goal, even as the Prime Minister supported taking action.

A sombre George Osborne has just popped up on the Today programme saying that parliament last night triggered 'soul searching' in the country. 'I think there will be a national soul-searching about our role in the world and whether Britain wants to play a big part in upholding the international system, be that big open and trading nation that I'd like us to be or whether we turn our back on that.

David Cameron has lost far more than the argument over Syria. He put his credibility on the line tonight, and lost. This is not just an extraordinary defeat but a spectacular political misjudgment, as I say in my Daily Telegraph column tomorrow. There will be a great many more questions asked tomorrow: from a sleepy summer recess, Cameron has conjured up one of the most spectacular parliamentary defeats in modern political history. The first such foreign policy defeat since 1782. What on earth was No10 thinking? That it could depend on Ed Miliband’s support? (He spoke abysmally today, by the way, offering a "sequenced roadmap", and his amendment was defeated. There are only losers in today’s vote.

The Sunday Times p1 today reveals (to people who don’t read the Daily Telegraph or CoffeeHouse) that Theresa May is planning a Modern Slavery Bill. The Home Secretary writes about its details in the newspaper and in so doing exhibits a very peculiar trait. She appears to belong to a tiny subcategory of politicians: those who want to be known by what they do rather than what they say. The Home Office is normally a politician’s graveyard. But she is enacting reform after reform and her quiet momentum has seen her overtake Boris to become the bookmakers’ favourite to succeed David Cameron as Tory leader (when the time comes). Abu Qatada has been put in the catapault many times before: only May managed to release the elastic.

Today is the United Nations day for he Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition – and the school packs have been readied to tell pupils about Britain’s part in this great evil. But the way we tend to remember (and, occasionally, apologise for) slavery has two main problems.  Yes, British traders played a full and shameful part in the slave trade. But what marks Britain out is out objection to it. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years – yet nowhere in the world was slavery controversial until the 1780s when some Brits started kicking up a fuss about it. White slaves were being sold in the Ottoman empire long after American slaves were freed.

I'm just back from three weeks away to find the summer momentum very strongly behind the Tories. A ComRes poll suggests that the majority of Labour supporters think Ed Miliband is doing badly, and things are going so strongly for the Tories (as George Trefgarne writes) that the odds on a Tory majority are shrinking rapidly. So why would Cameron be planning for another coalition, as my colleague James Kirkup writes in his Telegraph splash today? His piece has struck a nerve in No. 10, which is strongly denying that the Prime Minister is thinking of anything other than a Conservative majority in 2015. There are, I'm told, no plans to change any rules to make coalition more doable after the next election. Of course, you may say, Cameron would say this anyway.