David Cameron’s 2007 Conservative Party conference speech was one of the most effective of recent years. It united the party and averted a general election. Cameron set out his political beliefs and positioned himself to be as different as he could from Gordon Brown. Brown spoke from a prepared script; so Cameron spoke unscripted:
Two years ago, I stood on this stage and I gave a speech, a short speech, about why I wanted to lead our party. Today I want to make a speech about why I want to lead our country. I am afraid it is going to be a bit longer and I haven’t got an autocue and I haven’t got a script, I’ve just got a few notes, so it might be a bit messy, but it will be me.
His notes, which he hardly looked at, were more of a diagram, with his main themes set across the pages in boxes. Single words or short phrases triggered sections of speech. But it was a very long speech, over an hour, with several longueurs.
The new generation of 21st-century political speakers could learn some tricks from the old dogs about how to be entertaining. Styles and situations change, but audiences still need to be entertained if the political message is to get through. Michael Heseltine’s mocking of Gordon Brown at the 1994 Conservative Party conference is a classic:
As the audience listened with awe, Gordon Brown filled in the details. [Pause] Just to jog your memory, Mr Chairman, here they are again: ‘Our new economic approach is rooted in ideas which stress the importance of macroeconomic neoclassical endogenous growth theory and the symbiotic relationships between growth and investment in people and infrastructure.’ Clear, unambiguous and to the point. Well, last week the Guardian disclosed that the speech had not been written by Brown but by a 27-year-old choral singing researcher, Ed Balls. Labour’s brand new shining economic dream. But it wasn’t Brown’s, it was Balls’!
