The Spectator's Notes

29 September 2007

Was there a single respect in which Gordon Brown made a good speech at Bournemouth?

Its delivery was dull, but don’t puritanically fool yourself that the matter was better than the manner. It offered no new idea and made no attempt to reason with the audience about any of the phenomena in the modern world which might worry us. What is the nature of international Islamist terrorism? What is our foreign policy and what part are our troops playing in it? Why did we have an apparently sudden banking crisis last week? Mr Brown explained nothing about any of these things. Instead, he produced boilerplate faux-conservative phraseology about ‘our island’s story’ and ‘tough new powers’ against crime. He hymned the NHS for having had a 50 per cent success rate in saving his eyes. In a deliberate echo of Mrs Thatcher’s speeches about her father’s moral influence on her, he praised his father’s on him. He also, as she did, referred approvingly to the Parable of the Talents. But when Mrs Thatcher used that story she had an actual and controversial point to make. She argued that the parable showed that entrepreneurism is blessed by God because it produces good fruit from the seed He plants. Mr Brown’s interpretation was merely that ‘everyone has a talent and each and every one of us should be able to use that talent’. But the parable is not about what we should be free to use: it is about how to use that freedom. Mr Brown then hurried on to compare himself to Christ (‘suffer the little children’) in support of his plans to nationalise family life. Yet ‘Middle Britain’, the press kept saying, was thrilled. Why?

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