WHEN opportunity knocks, turn off the lights and pretend you’ve gone to walk the dog.
That, I’m sorry to report, may be the lesson from David Cameron’s latest “keynote” speech.
He began his day extolling the virtues of opportunity by giving a handful of sleep-deprived hacks the opportunity to get up early on a Monday morning to travel halfway across the country. Then the pupils at the venue, an academy in Runcorn, were given the opportunity to miss their lunch break to listen to him. If these are the sorts of chances the PM hopes to extend to all, I’d like the opportunity to opt out.
The pupils, ushered into the school’s “learning plaza”, were told they would not even be treated to the PM’s stand- up routine. The comedian John Bishop is an old boy and regularly returns to the school, but the boy in front of me slumped in his seat as Mr Cameron warned “there are no jokes in this speech at all”. Instead, this was to be an English lesson from the Prime Ministerial lexicon. His questionable definition of opportunity was nothing compared to the bewildering array of new and magisterially incomprehensible phrases about to be drummed into the sixth formers.
Before Mr Cameron had even begun, his warm-up act, a blushing Christian Guy from the Centre for Social Justice, had already lavished praise on the audience’s contingent of “social pioneers” and “transformation people”.
When I was at school, we just called them Power Rangers.
Then it was time for the main act, who we discovered was himself a transformation person. He had morphed from the “pumped up” shirtsleeves-and-sweat Dave of the campaign trail into a sober and precise chairman of the board, so focused on the job that he left his hair to go grey at the back. Hell, he even wore a tie.
“When it comes to extending opportunity, there is a right track and a wrong track,” he began. Those of us who had caught the first train to Runcorn nodded bitterly.
The right track, it transpired, involves social impact bonds. “We’ve issued more social impact bonds in Britain than the rest of the world put together,” he boasted. Nobody pointed out this might be because even the atomic scientists at Cern haven’t begun to grasp what they are.
After a discussion of his “One Nation approach”, we finally reached a section I could understand. Speaking about families, the PM boomed: “I’ve never been shy about supporting the work they do.” I could understand the words, that is, but not why he had chosen to say them in that order.
The woman sitting next to me was lapping it all up, though. Jean Fairchild, one of the dinner ladies, had been let down on her only visit to Downing Street. “He was out,” she muttered conspiratorially. “We only saw the cat.”
As we left the hall, I caught sight of the school’s motto, Lucere Aude (dare to shine). Dangerously concise. Perhaps Mr Guy’s speechwriters could lend a hand. “Incubating tomorrow’s transformation people” has a certain ring to it. What an opportunity.