D Reilly

The Tories’ Boris Johnson problem

I watched the Tory party conference on television this morning for as long as I could take it. Obviously I wouldn’t under normal circumstances – nobody sane would – but I’d been left in sole charge of a six-month old child (my son) and I wanted him to understand that life is very often pain. We made it through Dominic Raab’s bore-athon, but during Philip Hammond’s effort one of us filled his pants and so I turned it off. It seemed an appropriate protest.

Why were the speeches so bad? And, more to the point, why did the speakers seem such unbelievable dullards? There’s no excuse. This is their job.

The great cliché of speechmaking is that if you’re nervous you try to imagine the people in the crowd you are speaking to naked. That’s meant to help. But no one ever mentions the other side of the same deal: every single person in the audience, unless you’re wildly interesting (and perhaps even then), will certainly think about what you look like naked, and much worse. During the Raab and Hammond speeches I found myself wondering if either man was a certifiable pervert, and if so, what his thing would be. I know I won’t have been alone in this. The mind wanders so horribly.

I write speeches for a living, mostly for corporate droids who hate public speaking. I don’t blame them. Usually it turns out they’re brilliant at scaring the life out of sales teams or driving the kind of mad efficiencies Stalin would have marvelled at. As a result, they’ve been promoted and promoted and promoted until suddenly there’s a curtain the other side of which five hundred people sit, waiting patiently to be enlightened. “But this isn’t what I’m good at,” they think, understandably.

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