Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

Theresa May’s disastrous conference speech: the newspaper verdict

Theresa May’s Tory party conference speech was a memorable one if only for all the wrong reasons. A prankster, her faltering voice and a broken sign meant the Prime Minister’s reboot did not go to plan. Here is the newspaper verdict on May’s nightmare speech:

The luck that all leaders need has ‘deserted Theresa May’, says the Times. The Prime Minister’s speech was undoubtedly a ‘presentational disaster’. Yet while ‘there will be many who see this ill-starred speech as the last straw’, whether the PM survives ‘cannot be decided on the basis of optics’. Instead, the party needs to consider its options, and ask what it can do once May ‘gets her voice back’ – or, indeed, ‘what alternatives there might be were she to quit or be bundled out.’. Whatever the party does decide, it’s clear some urgent thinking is required. ‘May seems to understand the seriousness of Britain’s housing crisis’, but her answer yesterday – which could mean as few as 5,000 new homes a year – was ‘timid’ and when you take away the ‘theatrics’ from the conference hall in Manchester, May’s address was ‘well-meaning but thin’. It’s true that she bared ‘a little of her soul’, and also vowed to ‘sweep away injustice’. Yet she only mentioned the main topic of the day – Brexit – ‘halfway through the speech’, by which point it was too late, the Times says. One thing she managed to do was unite her party ‘in sympathy’. It’s a pity that ‘what she needed was authority’.

May’s speech is ’the most unusual leader’s speech delivered to a Conservative conference since Margaret Thatcher’s after the Brighton bomb in 1984’, according to the Guardian. The paper says ‘it was an excruciating public agony’ and the ‘metaphorical potential’ of the sign tumbling down behind her ‘was lethally obvious’.

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