Weirdly dated and hesitant, the chill snoot was no orator
Sees moneybags Gina Miller give the day’s big speech
FOR their main conference speaker yesterday the dear old Liberal Democrats looked to someone who was not actually a democratically elected figure. She was introduced instead as ‘one courageous citizen’: moneybags anti-Brexit litigant Gina Miller, who in 2016 won the controversial court case forcing the Government to square Brexit with Parliament.
Mrs Miller gave the big speech of the day, just after elevenses. She glided up to the lectern with demure self-delight, spoke for half an hour, then stomped out of the hall (after an initial wrong turn) with coiffed head slanted skywards. We lucky people to have been vouchsafed her precious time.
As orators go, she is in the Vanarama League – fancies herself a pro’ but is really a bit of a toebanger. The speaking voice? Hesitant and weirdly dated, occasionally placing the emPHAsis on the wrong syLLABle. I overheard Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable gossiping to an aide just after Mrs Miller’s speech. With a faint edge of satisfaction in his voice, Vince said that Mrs Miller had ‘sounded like the Queen’. I’d call that a harsh judgment – on the Queen.
Her Majesty’s voice has warmth and she seldom fumbles words. Mrs Miller’s larynx communicated sparse sympathy. If there was any similarity with our Monarch it was with the Queen in the early years of her reign, back in the days of deference and the royal ‘we’.
Having opened by saying that she was not interested in becoming their leader, she announced: ‘I have travelled around our Great Britain.’ Our Great Britain! Having toured her realm, she felt able to speak on behalf of ‘the ordinary people’ with a great deal more authority than any politicians who supported Brexit.
‘I challenge them to speak to ordinary people,’ she said about politicians like Boris and Farage.
AFEW delegates clapped but the line was uttered with all the bombast of a legal clause. Shortly beforehand, Wera Hobhouse MP had told the delegates ‘you must resist this toxic argument that the people have spoken’. A national referendum with a record turnout is now ‘toxic’? Blimey.
Mrs Miller said that leaving the EU in March would mean ‘losing everything we hold dear – NHS funding, jobs, social cohesion, our sense of who we are’.
I missed the next bit of her speech because a chap fell up the stairs of the raked seating, making a dreadful clattering. People kept stumbling up those steps. Reader Graham Pack sent me an email yesterday asking if there were lots of open-toed sandals at this conference. Actually, I have seen more surgical boots – no fewer than four of them. The Lib Dems seem to have terrible luck with their feet.
Back on the platform, Mrs Miller was emitting mechanical, frosty phrases.
SHE started citing something William Gladstone said about ‘mutual love’ and it not being limited to the shores of Britain. The most important thing in politics was ‘humanity’ she intoned. The lifeless delivery did nothing to assist the raw words. Her white outfit was jolly smart and probably cost a bomb but it was a touch dental-clinic for my delicate palate. Might Nurse Miller at any moment tells us to ‘now rinse, please’?
A few words went haywire. ‘Lloyd George’ came out as ‘Lloyd Joydge’. ‘Opponents’ became ‘oppynents’. ‘United Kingdom’ was ‘United Kingham’, which may be near Chipping Norton. Piffling pismronunciations, you might say, and that is a fair point. But they accentuated the palpable distance between this chill snoot and the humble electorate.
Pro-Leave was home to ‘dark, extreme agendas’. In order to stop ‘the decay in democracy’ it was necessary, averred this millionaire whose glossy-brochured, look-at-me, anti-Brexit campaigns have been supported by offshore plutocrat Sir Richard Branson, to abjure ‘foreign money’. ‘Put aside vanity!’ she cried with a shake of her lustrous mane.
Were the obvious answer not ‘yes, a hundred thousand times’, you’d be tempted to ask ‘has she never looked in the mirror?’