Spinning from the heart

Call me perverse (one at a time, please) but the thing that’s drawn the most plaudits about David Cameron’s speech yesterday is the thing that puts me off the most. Yes, it was a remarkable feat of memory, coolness and bravado to deliver a 67 minute peroration without reading it. But what was the point of doing that? To convince us of his sincerity, that he was speaking from the heart. That’s why he started by saying:

I haven’t got an autocue and I haven’t got a script, I’ve just got a few notes so it might be a bit messy; but it will be me.

But it was clearly not an impromptu set of remarks. He had memorised much if not all of it, and undoubtedly endlessly rehearsed it. The implication that he’d merely scribbled down a longhand aide memoire of bullet points just before coming on stage is, to put it mildly, implausible. But it was spun as a virtually extempore presentation, and much of the media suspended their disbelief (the BBC’s description of it last night as ‘unscripted’ was absurd). Undoubtedly, it was a very impressive performance; but a performance it was. It was the theatre of sincerity, heavily contrived to look like it wasn’t contrived.

In other words, we’re in a contest between two spin machines, competing for the seriousness high ground — and at the end of the party conferences, there’s no doubt that David Cameron spins sincerity far better than Gordon Brown. Whether that is really an unalloyed cause for joy is another matter.