Pfffffrrrt! Life left Tories like air from a lilo with a puncture

SOMe budgie trainer had taught Philip Hammond to say ‘I am an optimist’. He did not follow it up with ‘who’s a pretty boy, then?’ or demand a handful of Trill.

He just perched on the platform, gazing down his beak at a less than full hall, narrowing his right eye with glum self-satisfaction.

You could sense the air pffffrrrting out of the Conservatives, life leaving a punctured lilo. Behold Hammond, P, the vote-shrivelling Cadaver of the exchequer. Day two of Tory conference should be a big moment in the British political year, when the Chancellor (or Shadow Chancellor when they are out of office) lays down the political direction of his party’s money plans. Should taxes drop? Should the state shrink? Which industries/voters are they going to encourage? Where laps the moral tidemark of wealth retention?

With the force of oratory the Chancellor must put flesh on all that.

At every level Mr Hammond’s performance yesterday was inadequate. This was the worst conference speech by a Chancellor I have heard.

It was grey, cliched, bare on detail, shorn of news value, its humour stale and the whole caboodle delivered so lifelessly that had it been coley you would not have offered it to an alley cat. Activists, burned by past Hammond bore-athons, stayed away in droves. Theresa May was not in the hall. The leader usually attends a Chancellor’s turn.

I counted just four mentions of ‘tax’: a cursory line about ‘ keeping taxes low’ (actually, they are swingeingly high), a claim that ‘we’ve delivered tax cuts for 31 million people’, and a couple of moments when he talked about taxing international companies and proposed a new digital services tax. And that was it.

My notes assure me he spoke of his ‘vision’ but the word had no pulse. What lazy conceitedness to give a speech with so little energy.

‘Our duty is to agitate constantly,’ he droned. The only agitation evident was of two chaps in front of me who clambered over a barrier to leave the hall early. They’d had enough of Hammond. So has the country.

A turgid, off-the-peg peroration was coughed up with leaden lack of panache. ‘We have to take out people with us,’ he had said earlier. Well, mate, you won’t, not with turgid performances like that. Why does such a technocratic groaner go into frontline politics? Statesmen and women need to be able to inspire, grab, rivet an audience. If they can’t do that, wild demagoguery will indeed prosper.

THe day, thankfully, brought two far better speeches: Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and Scots Tory leader Ruth Davidson.

Mr Raab was grown-up and balanced yet he gave the eU’s ‘ theological’ obstructionism enough of a spanking to win his eurosceptic audience. He also had a moving passage, delivered with admirable backbone, about how he intended to honour the memory of his Jewish father, Peter, in fighting the Corbynites’ antiSemitism. The hall plugged into this bigtime. Lord Callanan was almost in tears. Then Miss Davidson. The moment she came bowling on stage, wreathed in grins, the place quivered with optimism. She joked about her size (she is pregnant) and she filled the activists – whom she cheerfully called ‘folks’ – with a sense of can-do Centrism – not really my thing, but she sells it brilliantly.

Here was someone who waved her hands in a natural manner, who chuckled, who looked and sounded comfortable. Could the Tories form the next Scottish government? ‘Damn right’ they could. Instant cheers.

She had the theatrical ability to lend her alto timbre the occasional shudder of vulnerability. And she attacked the ‘negativity, the grievance, the decade-longmoan’ of so much politics. She was actually talking about the SNP but her target could so easily have been Philip Hammond.

No doubt he’ll soon be as envious of her normality and zest as he is of Boris.