The cavernous hall housing the Tory conference speeches is not particularly conducive to a good atmosphere. All of the speakers so far this morning, including rising star Sajid Javid, haven’t raised the roof, and the applause and standing ovations have felt rather polite and perfunctory, rather than excited and inspired. This might also be because a large number of delegates have spent a rather long time stuck in the rain waiting for someone to scan their bags in the security tent.
Or it could be because none of the ministers speaking wants to appear too exciting, as too exciting means you are a threat to George Osborne, which tends to leave you in a messy place as a minister. It also risks making you look as though you are too impatient for a leadership contest that won’t start for a few years.
Even on the fringes and at parties, many ambitious ministers seem to be playing it safe. James notes that Sajid Javid needs to work out a way of doing sincere rousing rhetoric in the conference hall, but he also needs to work this out for his party circuit speech, too. By the end of yesterday, those who had attended a number of different Tory conference parties were observing that they’d heard the same speech three times in one evening from Javid. This recycling of jokes and observations is something all politicians do as they tour the country to speak to associations, which are all made up of different people who won’t have heard what’s being said before. But you can’t pull that trick at conference, where everyone moves from party to party.
Javid has plenty of time before the leadership contest to fix this sort of thing. Similarly, ministers such as Justine Greening and Nicky Morgan, who have either appeared quite keen to stray from their brief in speeches or have declared that they do want to stand, have plenty of time to build up the sort of parliamentary base that they need. But so far the leadership beauty contest has been rather civilised and low key.
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