Sound and Fury

Having had a serious interest in politics for many years, I have naturally not given much attention to the major speeches of the conference season. I know it keeps a lot of journalists in business but speeches rarely change anything. If they do, it is because the speaker is someone who has the power to cause you to listen. Thereafter, it is largely a case of summing up the mood of the audience and crystallising their half-formed feelings and notions.

Here are a few comments from pundits:

David Cameron's speech to Tory Party conference was boring, well delivered and basically irrelevant (Independent)

..it was the ideas that were spelt out today, and the way that they were, which sounded authentically like David Cameron. (Nick Robinson, BBC)

This wasn't a speech with new thinking on the big challenges for the future. It was more of the same old ideas that didn't work the first time round. (Francis O'Grady, TUC)

David Cameron's speech shows Ed Miliband has got under his skin (Guardian)

David Cameron has shown why the Tories are the truly moral party (Peter Oborne, Telegraph

My favourite, by far, is Max Hastings damning with faint praise:

he will be remembered in the same breath as Harold Macmillan, who behaved as prime minister in accordance with the Old Etonian maxim, that a gentleman should not be seen to try

All in all, apart from Peter Oborne's somewhat baroque reading of it, the Cameron speech did not appear to have them fighting on the beaches. 

Reading through dozens of comments by us ordinary folk, I get the impression that nationally, this speech to the Tory Party Conference did not set the country alight. Telegraph readers were outraged at Oborne's summing up. Nobody really thinks that politicians are in any sense, "moral".

David Cameron has many perceptional problems when it comes to explaining himself, not the least because he does not seem to employ the kind of people who can get the message out. But his main problem I think, is that he does little to demonstrate an empathy with the mood of the country, and in particular, Conservatives.

So far so good. I have not made any major revelations. We all think Cameron's a bit shit.

I began by highlighting the nature of speeches. What makes a speech great is that it comes from the heart and it strikes a chord with the many, not the few. If there is one lesson to be learned from the raft of conference chatter it is that politicians are still out of touch, still bereft of a moral compass and still apparently, in it for themselves and their chums.