The Labour Party conference has closed leaving crucial questions unresolved.

Bournemouth on Thursday was like "a ghost town without the spectres" according to one observer, with 250 sixth form students having to be bussed in to fill empty seats in the conference hall.

But at the end of what many delegates now feel is too long a week, with little actual business now undertaken by the conference, Labour's leadership can reflect on what has been a largely successful week with only one significant defeat.

However going in to the gathering three crucial question marks hung over the government and only one can truly be said to have been put to bed.

First, could ministers convince the party and the country that key public service policies did pass the prime minister's "fairness test".

On foundation hospitals the jury is still out.

Health secretary John Reid claimed he "won the argument but lost the vote".

He was heartened by the fact that a majority of constituency delegates backed the idea of self-governing health trusts, despite union block votes securing a majority for a rebel amendment condemning a "two tier NHS".

But attempts to draw trade unions closer to the party will remain difficult as long as the issue divides them.

Their victory in the health debate was a reminder that their voice remains strong.

On top-up university tuition fees and the crackdown on crime, Cabinet members fared slightly better.

While scepticism remains, the education and home secretaries couched their arguments in the tradition of Labour standing up for the poor without backtracking on the concrete details of their plans.

The second question mark hanging over the party is declining trust in Tony Blair.

While most voters may be more interested to hear from Lord Hutton, Labour members were keen to see whether their leader could still connect with them.

His keynote speech on Tuesday was a huge event, with genuine uncertainty as to what he would say.

In a sense that uncertainty still remains, with one activist telling ePolitix.com in the evening "I'm still not sure what he actually said".

The speech was light on detail and new announcements, but a move away from the imposition of top down policy initiatives was one if its key themes.

Instead what was striking about the address was its deliberately low key tone, reminding many of Blair's gift for sensing the appropriate language for big political occasions.

The section on Iraq - by far the hardest to write - was the best example of this.

By agreeing to disagree and asking for understanding and not support for the decision to go to war, Blair found the right words.

The voters may yet punish him if no weapons of mass destruction are found, but the prime minister and his party seemed ready to move on.

The third question related to how long Tony Blair intends to remain at the Labour helm.

On the first evening of the event, Channel Four's screening of a dramatisation of an alleged deal between Blair and Gordon Brown was the talk of the conference.

The chancellor did little to quash talk of his ambitions for the highest office the following day with his tub thumping speech talking of Labour's "soul" and "values".

And as a savvy media operator, the Scotsman will have been well aware of how the media would interpret his stealing of a line from Blair's own speech of last year but adorning it with his own suffix.

"We are at our best when we our boldest," Brown said, before adding: "We are at our best when we are Labour".

The significance was not lost on home secretary David Blunkett, who said in his own address that both of those things were true.

But Blunkett, a man who might fancy his own chances of succeeding Blair one day, went further still.

"We are best of all when we are in touch with, providing aspiration to, speaking the language of the people we seek to serve," he declared.

He, too, will know his remarks will be reported as a snub to Brown who was lauded for using the "language of Labour".

However Blair could not kill the succession question off, however many times he tried during interviews and comments throughout the week.

And for all the ovations given to the leader both before and after his speech - by delegates determined to prove predictions of splits wrong - the mood was never more buoyant in Bournemouth than after Brown's oration.