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. Typically, they will want to fill 30 minutes with words that are simultaneously dynamic-sounding and instantly forgettable, with some sort of lame joke thrown in at the start, in the hope the sound of the laughter will be comforting for them.
For corporate types, this response to the chore of public speaking, although a shame, is forgivable. After all, making speeches is not what they are ultimately judged upon (unless they say something particularly idiotic). So why not be dull? Get it over and done with, and then back to the business of making lots and lots of lovely money.
But for politicians, this excuse does not apply. Speaking, almost above all else, is what they are meant to be good at. It’s how they’re supposed to demonstrate they are the great leaders they believe themselves to be. But watching Raab and Hammond, it was impossible to ignore the irony of the fact that these two would-be global statesmen seemed to possess not one quality that marked either out as a natural leader. No twinkle in the eye. No capability to make you see from a fresh perspective what you thought you already understood. And, crucially, no persuasive charisma. Their speeches, in fact, seemed corporate – forgettable platitude layered upon forgettable platitude, delivered as if they had batteries in their backs. They were dreadful.
And this is weird. Because both men – like the rest of Tory high command – wanted to distract us this week from Boris Johnson, who is currently very probably the best speechmaker in the English-speaking world. You might not like Boris, in fact you might detest him vigorously, but when he speaks you listen. I would venture that’s because he’s got a twinkle in his eye, because his perspective is endlessly fresh (in 2016 he told the conference liberty’s “golden coin” had on either side “a two-for-one Snickers ice cream and a copy of Private Eye”), and because he possesses persuasive charisma in scarcely creditable abundance. The idea that anybody in their right mind would find Raab and Hammond, or any other Tory cabinet member (with an honourable exception for Michael Gove), sufficiently diverting to ignore Boris is laughable, certainly on this morning’s showing.
In speechmaking terms, Boris is like the great batsman Kevin Pietersen. Divisive, but utterly unmissable. And devastatingly effective. At Tory party conference, he stands out a mile. Not just because of his own undeniable talent for oratory but because of the unignorable paucity of his colleagues’. The Conservative Party has an astonishing lack of star speakers within its top rank, conference makes that horribly clear. By rounding on Boris, Theresa May and co only draw attention to this very serious problem. Boris seems the only one prepared to say what he actually believes, in language that is accessible and engaging. Against their grey, corporate dissembling (particularly on the subject of Brexit), that makes him mightily powerful.
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