Last night was a strange one, make no mistake. The Labour faithful were in high spirits after Gordon's speech which had something for both the left (abolishing hereditary peers) and the right (a ban on council houses for teen mums) of the party. But later on the news that The Sun had declared its hand for the Tories after 12 years of supporting Labour changed the mood somewhat.

As debates raged verbally in the Grand and Hilton bars, things also erupted in the blogosphere with furious debate taking place over Twitter among those using the #lab09 hashtag.

Twitter tsar Kerry McCarthy attracted howls, well tweets, of derision when she tweeted: 'Labour doesn't need the Sun, we've got Twitter!' For what it's worth I think this is slightly silly but I'd question whether The Sun is still this all-powerful entity that its pompous hacks and suits like to think it is. Yeah it might have contributed to Neil Kinnock's defeat in 1992 but think about the media landscape back then and where we are now. Anyway they simply want to back a winner and one glance at the polls tells you which way the wind is blowing.

But if The Sun's desertion of Labour bothered Culture secretary Ben Bradshaw he wasn't letting on. Not only did he attend last night's News International bash (this is what I'm told - I wanted to crash it but was way off the pace and didn't even know where it was being held!) but way into the early hours of the morning he could be seen belting out an assortment of Oasis, Beatles and Monkees tunes around the piano in the Grand bar.

As he seems a nice enough guy - I met him earlier this week - I'll resist the temptation to make a snide remark. But 'excruciating' and 'painful' were some of the words tweeted out by onlookers.