Blood, sweat but no tears.. thanks to Ruth
sees conference get off to a stodgy start
NOT even Tintin or Captain Haddock sweated as much as Sajid Javid did yesterday when addressing the Tory conference. reading that, you may think Local Government Secretary Javid gave a thunderous speech, a furious lectern-whacker which drained such energy from him that his pores opened like the sluices of the Hoover Dam. Yet it was a decidedly humdrum effort, delivered in a staccato but generally placid manner. He spoke about housing policy and made sorrowful noises about the Grenfell Tower disaster and the Manchester bomb attack which happened just 1,500 yards from where this conference is happening. All right and proper, but hardly sweatsville.
If Mr Javid perspires so much when giving a dullish speech, you dread to think what happens when he does his pre-breakfast star-jumps.
The conference, far from packed, got off to a sticky start when party chairman Sir Patrick McLoughlin made a ploddingly awful speech. How can so dismal an orator rise so high in politics? He stared at his autocue with shifty unease, as though it might be about to bite him.
Every time he stalled, naturally, the autocue’s text stopped. Sir Patrick gulped.
Then he accelerated a little – perhaps hoping to confuse it; so the autocue went faster, and panic entered Sir Patrick’s eyes. He makes John Prescott sound like Martin Luther King. Things improved only a fraction when First Secretary Damian Green wandered on with a TV game-show host’s gait and talked about the ‘crusade’ and ‘mission’ of the Government – not least the need to allow half a million homes to be built by the end of 2022.
Mr Green is a decent bloke but scintillation eludes him. He stands with shoulders slightly hunched, using phrases that might as well be grey carpet tiles.
The one unusual thing about his performance yesterday was that as he left the lectern he tripped and very nearly went splat on the stage.
Oh, if only. It would at least have lifted the torpor in the hall – which only increased during a speech by Education Secretary Justine Greening.
YOur sketchwriter was considering a streak round the hall – anything to stir the place a little – when salvation arrived in the form of Scottish Conservatives leader ruth Davidson.
She came bustling on in a big red jacket and did a wee skip to clear the step that had nearly undone Mr Green.
Bang. Straight into it, with an opening joke: ‘It’s great to be here in Manchester – or as I call it, the southern powerhouse.’
She had been greeted with a standing ovation and set about showing us why she is regarded as a possible future leader.
Her word-rate was speedier, her eyes roamed the audience (she did not depend so much on the autocue) and she brought some informality to the drabness.
For years, she said, there had been only one Tory MP in Scotland – the party was ‘outgunned by those sodding pandas’.
The ripe language went down well. Now the party had 13 Scots MPs and the pandas were ‘going to have to go some, to catch up’. Briskness, wit and bombast were melded with solid exposition of Tory values – the family, property ownership, work and classlessness.
SHE spoke with optimism, telling the activists (if we can call so stodgy an audience that) to pull themselves together and stop being wet and defeatist about Corbynism.
She also took coded swipes at Philip Hammond and Boris Johnson, saying the party should ‘unite and fight’ (ie fight Labour, not themselves). She repeatedly referred to herself as ‘serious’ – something she apparently thinks Boris is not.
Those who wish Miss Davidson would stand for a Westminster seat, essential if she is ever to become party leader, were given the clever line that although she loved London, she had ‘no plans to move there myself’.
If only, if only, if only this punchy and immediate crowd-grabber was not so snooty about Brexit.