I’m an old conference hand going back to the Tories’ annual get-together of 1958. My headmaster, an Irish Christian Brother of firm nationalist sympathies, almost certainly felt that attendance was an occasion of sin. But he relented to the extent of allowing me to skip Saturday morning sports for the prime ministerial rally. Harold Macmillan got as far as ‘My Lords, ladies, and gentlemen…’ when a trumpet blast sounded and the first of several hecklers shouted ‘The League of Empire Loyalists sound retreat.’ Mayhem ensued for about 15 minutes, after which Macmillan resumed imperturbably: ‘Blackpool is so bracing.’
Since then I have had high standards for both oratory and spontaneity on such occasions. They were more than met at the Guildhall last Wednesday, when I was invited to chair two sessions of the conference on Liberty, at which a slew of think tanks from home and abroad celebrated 40 years of the Centre for Policy Studies. Speakers included Niall Ferguson, Charles Moore, Charles Powell, Richard Epstein, Daniel Hannan, and Radek Sikorski. With only one hour for five speakers, however, and after a late start, I watched queasily as Esperanza Aguirre, the president of Spain’s Popular Party and her country’s own Iron Lady, sat calmly underlining a well-constructed talk some 26 pages long. ¡Que Papilon! Yet it was unthinkable that I should cut short the only woman speaker because others had overrun. I sent vague smiles and gestures in her direction that were intended to convey that less is more. She seemed not to notice them. (Perhaps, I worried, they had an insulting or obscene significance in Spain.) Then she strode to the lectern and, cutting her speech as she spoke, delivered a crisp eight-minute critique of how the Sixty-Eighters had demoralised the West through transforming education into indoctrination.
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