Bookended by the soothing techno of Moby and a (perhaps unintended) reference to Jimmy Cliff’s “You Can Get It If You Really Want It”, David Cameron today gave a speech that – if nothing else – stretched the boundaries of virtuosity in political performance. To speak with grace and confidence, for more than an hour, with only a few notes was an astonishing feat of memory and endurance.
This, of course, is an important part of the Tories’ election message, starting today. They want to present Dave as gutsy and up for it, in contrast to Gordon the Ditherer, Bottler Brown. The final passage of the speech was as close to “Come and get it if you think you’re hard enough” as this suave Old Etonian will ever get. As The Spectator argues in this week’s editorial, necessity has been the mother of sound politics for the Tories. In truth, Mr Cameron would have died a death on stage if he had not invited the PM out for a fight. But he did, and with feeling. His courage in choosing to speak the way he did was a metaphor for much else.
Just as Mr Brown has managed to turn his pathologies into assets in his first 100 days, so Mr Cameron has made a virtue of the fact that his party is entirely at the mercy of Mr Brown’s election calculations. Only a few weeks ago, many of the people who have gathered at Blackpool were writing their leader off as a glossy, second-rate rip-off of Blair, obsessed with greenery and political correctness, who was sleep-walking towards electoral disaster. Today, they could not get enough of him. That says a lot for the manner in which Mr Cameron’s team has conducted itself this week, and the policies it has unveiled. But it is just as much the PM’s achievement: Gordon has managed to unite the very party he wants to destroy.
The speech followed a clear path, beginning with a hat-tip to Margaret Thatcher, the fall of communism and “the long march to freedom” of the Soviet bloc. No prizes for guessing which country Mr Cameron now wants to liberate or whom he sees as a latter-day dictator. “Change required” was the main slogan of this address.
There was praise for Sayeeda Warsi, the shadow minister for social cohesion – that’s change – and for William Hague – that’s continuity. Then on to the attack against Gordon and a scornful account of Labour’s conference: “God, we’ve got to be better than that.” He played the high-tech card by name-checking Facebook and the group on the social network “David Cameron is a Hottie”: this was definitely for the viewers at home rather than the activists who think that a “social network” is the Rotary Club or the Legion (they’re right, too). Then there was a rousing section on the need for an EU referendum: Mr Cameron was initially nervous of this line of attack, fearing that it would associate the party with its troubled past over Europe. But, rightly, he has ditched his concerns, and embraced a campaign that unites both party and country, and has more to do with trust than abstruse points of sovereignty.
More than once, he spoke of “tearing up the rules” or “the rule-book”, pouring criticism on the culture of health and safety and the crazy regulations that prevent head teachers from imposing disciplines in their school. The section on education was blue in tooth and claw. He attacked the “educational establishment”, the appeals system that over-rules the exclusion of pupils from schools, and the public examination structure – hints here of much bigger involvement by the private sector under a Tory government. On welfare, he explicitly endorsed the Wisconsin system of workfare about which Fraser has written so well. He spoke with enthusiasm of the Australian benefit system, farmed out to the private sector. He called for “beat-based zero tolerance policing”. Not a huskie or a hoodie in sight.
Well, it wasn’t all hardcore. On the NHS, Mr Cameron spoke with passion and promised – in contrast to the passage on schools – to trust the professionals and keep open district hospitals. He promised “sensible greenery” – as opposed, one assumed, to un-sensible greenery. He did not resile an inch from the changes he has made to the party and its image. This was, as one of his key advisers put it to me, all about “balancing” the offer to the public. But it was a more robust, no-nonsense Cameron on display today.
And it was compelling stuff, no question about it. Only rarely are conference speeches by party leaders truly memorable, but this was definitely one of them. On the day, after a nightmare summer, Cameron came through for his party, and now, in a few days, if an election is called, they may have to come through for him. The conference season has ended, and the rank and file are leaving Blackpool, probably for the last time. But, as far as the greater battle is concerned, this was only the end of the beginning.
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