Celebrations cancelled, normal politics suspended. That was the austere backdrop yesterday as Labour delegates descended on fortress Brighton for their truncated annual conference.
By any normal standard this should have been one hell-of-a-party.
It is less than three months since Tony Blair led Labour to an unprecedented second full term.
After 100 years of history spent mostly out of power, his first term administration had delivered significantly if not massively: a minimum wage, onslaughts on youth unemployment and child poverty, Scottish and Welsh devolution, and the beginning of the end of hereditary privilege in the House of Lords.
Forced to fiscal rectitude, New Labour's second term winners were adjudged the party of economic competence, and mandated to radically reform Britain's ailing public services.
This was to be "delivery" term. Yet just three months in, Labourites old and new are already fretful about the prospects of a still birth.
Mr Blair acknowledged yesterday he cannot know the cost of the upcoming war on global terrorism. Chancellor Brown, meanwhile, maintained the international crisis would not blow the government's spending plans off-course. However some economists suggest a sharp downturn in the world economy now could impact on growth forecasts and blow an £18 billion hole in those plans - so reducing the promised transformation of Britain's schools and hospitals to make-believe.
Former minister Mike O'Brien reflected the anxiety of many Labour MPs, telling the BBC's On The Record programme: "We need to win the war against terrorism but we also need to keep our promises."
As always with New Labour that relentless focus on the next election. Nor is the nervousness difficult to understand.
Labour's "popular" mandate was highly conditional, won on-back of the lowest turnout in British electoral history. And the worries about next time are compounded by the spectacle of Mr Blair once more assuming the role of Britain's commander-in-chief.
"He's a one club golfer," observes one veteran Labour watcher: "While he's off to war what's going to happen about 'delivery'? What's going to happen about tax and spend, the next spending review? And beyond the war, how's all this going to look in three years time when the domestic agenda dominates and with another election looming?"
Underlying such comment, of course, lies significant Labour unease about the war itself, and the likely cost at home and abroad.
It will not manifest itself in any significant rebellion over the next 21/2 days.
Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon will pave the way for a prime ministerial speech tomorrow, shaped by the certain expectation of imminent British involvement (maybe by then already under way) in hopefully devastating attacks on Osama bin Laden and his operational base in Afghanistan.
Mr Blair will have no time for the fainthearts who contend that support for appropriate response to the American terror attacks should not translate into "a blank cheque" for President Bush.
And he will carry the day. However conference planners will not be entirely able to still the voices of dissent.
Delegates may be denied opportunity to vote against British support for the President's "Son of Star Wars" missile defence programme. But the criticisms will be voiced alongside anguished concerns that - as MP Oona King put it yesterday - "barbarism" should not be met with barbarism, or the "killing of innocent civilians" answered with the killing of still more.
John Prescott yesterday acknowledged the balance to be struck between the values of a liberal democracy and its need of protection against forces which would destroy it.
But there is little doubting which way Mr Blair and his ministers incline.
Labour, like Britain, has yet to have serious debate about compulsory identification cards, and the obvious tension between an emergent "police state" and Mr Blunkett's benign vision of the card as badge of citizenship entitlement.
Likewise Mr Blair's promise of still-more draconian measures finds reluctance across a wide political spectrum, not least because the government is not seen to have effectively deployed the massive powers already available to it.
And if, as is reported, the US administration is to relax the rules on CIA assassinations, what might be the implications for Britain's secret and special services and their rules of engagement?
Many believe Labour has a story to tell about conflict resolution in Northern Ireland. And many far beyond the ranks of Ulster's Unionists are wondering how Labour's practise and experience there will ultimately square with the demands of a campaign against international terror already promised to be anything but antiseptic.
From Mr Blair's perspective probably the sooner Labour's conference is over the better. For their instincts on many of these issues are not his.
And many of the comrades will depart Brighton on Wednesday reflecting that - in support of his new best-friend in Washington - Mr Blair will have no more solid an ally in Parliament on Thursday than Iain Duncan Smith, the leader of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.