Will the lonely hearts of Britain be won over by Ed Miliband’s love letter?

His refrain of “Together we can” offered an echo of Barack Obama in his first White House bid. But the fact that the eyes of the world were on the US president and his attack on Isil supplied a reminder that Mr Miliband, a sideshow on his own big day, faced a monumental challenge to persuade the people not only that “the ethic of the 21st century is co-operation”, but that he was the one to cement that bond.

The Labour leader displayed his customary fluency and some bold ideas. His six-point prospectus for a fairer Britain offered a strong programme of house-building, better pay, green jobs, rising living standards and more apprenticeships. It took his flagship proposal, the rescue of the NHS, to get the hall to its feet and to lend some credence to the idea that Mr Miliband could rally the nation behind him.

In a speech that could be subtitled Miliband-by-numbers (10 years, six goals, at least five speeches in one), the statistics that he produced on health workers were the most compelling: 20,000 more nurses, 8,000 more GPs, 5,000 more homecare-workers, 3,000 more midwives comprise a sizeable boost. The question of how they are to be paid for goes to a key issue for any aspiring prime minister. Does he have the bravery for the task?

Mr Miliband’s plan was bold enough, assuming he really can recoup £1 billion from tax avoidance by hedge funds and others, as well as raising enough revenue from tobacco companies. Earmarking the money raised by a mansion tax on homes worth more than £2 million, the third part of the Miliband settlement, might provide enough money, year on year, to keep the NHS afloat for a while.

But as the King’s Fund think tank points out, even that package will not fill the funding gap and put the woefully under-funded social care system for elderly people on a sustainable footing. Whether a mansion tax is in the spirit of Nye Bevan’s model of a universal service, tax-funded with the consensus of all citizens and political parties, is much less certain. Some will wonder whether the NHS is becoming the RHS – a Robin Hood service which takes from the rich and gives to the poor.

Some senior Labour figures worry privately that a measure that elicited rapture in the hall will persuade the very voters whom Tony Blair wooed in London and the South East that Labour will not get their vote again. That risk may be exacerbated by the fact that Mr Miliband’s love letter to the lonely was directed explicitly to the working-class core vote that has turned from Labour in the North and melted away to the SNP in Scotland.

The estrangement of the struggling classes was at the centre of his message. Ed’s lonely heart Britain, a nation of atomised individuals abandoned by the Tories, would – he seemed to say – be drawn back to politics by his gospel of joint enterprise. But for all his talk of togetherness, this was a made-in-Westminster prospectus, political to its core.

Though he talked of devolution to cities, the great power-sharer placed no real stress on the decentralisation programme that runs like an artery through his own policy review. Nor, though he cleverly linked internationalism with Labour’s patriotic traditions, did Mr Miliband answer the English question that many of his senior MPs – including at least one shadow cabinet member – long for him to address.

All he had to do, they argue, is to admit that it isn’t fair that Scottish MPs have so much sway over legislation that affects only the English. Having addressed that anomaly, he could then leave the decision on the remedy for the constitutional convention that he has promised. That Mr Miliband made no such concession may prove a gift to the Tories at their conference next week and in the election campaign.

But that may not be the worst of Mr Miliband’s omissions, given that he apparently forgot crucial passages on deficit reduction and immigration. The longer-term risk is that voters fired up by the fervour of their own sense of disempowerment may not have been listening at all.

Mr Miliband likes cinema. His performance was choreographed, as ever, by his film director friend, Paul Greengrass. It is doubtful, however, that redrafting left the Labour leader any time to see Pride, the hit film about the miners’ strike. In one of its more poignant sequences, a miner’s wife gives a lone contralto rendition of the workers’ anthem, Bread and Roses.

“Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes: hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses.” Mr Miliband prefers loaves to roses. In a week when English patriotism stirred his conference, he was eager to return to the carbohydrate of what one senior aide calls “bread and butter issues”.

That is not so say his message entirely lacked the scent of flowers. It may have been less impressive than his previous two conference addresses – because of the scope of his arguments and because people have come to expect a faultless presentation – but it was masterful and heartfelt none the less.

It is now for the voters to decide whether Ed Miliband’s promises have also touched their hearts. If so, Labour can dare to hope for its 10 years in power. If not, then isolation may beckon for the master of togetherness.