Talk is cheap

This article is from the October issue of Total Politics

Come on then. Let’s just have done with it. Let’s scrap the party leaders’ conference speeches completely and get Piers Morgan in to do a series of fawning, tell-all interviews instead.

Then, instead of being subjected to all that tedious party-policy prattle, we can hear about the stuff that really matters: what our esteemed political leaders do to relax (Arctic Monkeys or Angry Birds?), when they last cried and how many people they’ve slept with.

And TV execs will love it – although I suspect the proud political anorak-wearing readers of Total Politics magazine will be less keen. “What!” you say, “Do away with party conference speech? Shame on you, Lancaster, you villainous, tickle-brained miscreant! How could you, as a speechwriter, call for the abolition of the one remaining speech of importance in the political cycle?”

In my defence, that’s the way we’re going anyway. What started as a gradual slide in quality has rapidly turned into a free-fall. Just look at the last three years alone… It’s now all about the personal. The political is an optional extra.

We’ve seen Dave telling us what it felt like to carry his dying son into hospital, tears filling his eyes while the camera panned to Samantha, face frozen at the memory. We’ve seen Gordon parading his wife on the stage in some pathetic attempt to prove he was a human being (it failed). And we’ve seen Ed Miliband trying to resolve the greatest political psychodrama of recent years by joking about how brother David had stolen his football when they were kids. The only funny thing was watching David’s reaction, teeth clenched hard to prevent his true thoughts leaving his lips.

They’re not so much speeches as confessionals. It’s about divulging the kind of deep secrets that should really remain private between a man and his psychiatrist.

Party conference speeches never used to be like this. Can you imagine Ted Heath confiding the highs and lows of being a bachelor to a conference audience? Or Harold Macmillan ‘fessing up about how it felt to be a cuckold?

Unthinkable. But, back then, conference was very different: it served a more noble purpose than just feeding the media’s appetite. Conference was about discussion and debate. It was about agreeing strategies and positions. It was particularly about keeping the parliamentary party connected with the wider party.

It was a hive of activity, with reports to file, motions to consider, resolutions to agree. And it wasn’t just a hollow PR event; it contained real substance and grit.

Watch the YouTube clips of some of the Labour conferences of the mid-70s, as thumping heavyweights like Foot, Callaghan, Wilson, Jenkins, Healey and Benn rip into one another on issues like Europe, desperate to win their party’s backing.

It was in the 1980s that it all started going wrong. Conferences started to become more like presidential rallies. And, as the size of the lecterns grew, the importance of the debates shrank. It all became about presenting a united front to the media, whatever the cost. Nothing proved this better than when 87-year-old Walter Wolfgang was manhandled out of Labour’s conference for having the audacity to shout what everyone else was thinking.

All we’re left with now is the illusion of a conference, sustained only by the media and political class perpetuating a few myths.

Myth 1: These speeches are always make-or-break for the leader

How many times have you read that a party leader’s conference speech is make-or-break? That the story writes itself? “Beleaguered leader. Critical party. Competitors waiting to pounce. Yada, yada, yada…”

The truth is that these speeches are not really make-or-break. No party leader has ever received anything less than a rapturous response to their conference speech, even after serving up the direst, dullest diatribe.

Even Iain Duncan Smith received a standing ovation at his 2003 party conference, after two torrid years of leadership and a desperately limp speech. Of course, they got rid of him weeks later, but the speech was a success. The truth is that the audience knows its job is to make the leader look good. It will always happily oblige.

Myth 2: These speeches are ways for the leader to communicate with the public

They’re not – the public doesn’t give a damn. Of course, all the TVs will be on in the Wezzie, the Red Lion and the Marquis of Granby, but the punters will have far more important things to do: shopping, watching This Morning or washing their hair. They don’t really care.

Even the die-hard politicos in Westminster Village will only be watching half-heartedly. Most will watch the speech with the sound down, simultaneously tweeting and emailing, vaguely keeping an eye open for anything untoward. So they don’t care.

Even those watching the speech live from the hall won’t really care. Watch their eyes carefully when the camera pans the room. Most of them aren’t sitting attentively, they’re eyeing up the blonde three rows forward, thinking about how awful their hangover is or crossing their legs tightly, desperately trying to forget how badly they’re busting for a pee.

Myth 3: These are serious speeches

They’re not: they’re theatre. Party conferences are no longer big debates, but just huge productions, carefully constructed to generate a few fleeting images for the evening news. So instead of focusing on the content of the speech, the leader has far more mundane matters on his mind. For example, what kind of seating arrangement do they go for? Do they have the cabinet close or distant, and in a semi-circle or flat committee style? Do they parachute in some ethnic minorities and disabled people for the backdrop, or simply stand tall and display their narrow genetic pooling?
Then there’s the backdrop. Should they run with their traditional party colours or try something bolder? And the slogan: there are basically only three formulations, but it’s still important you pick the right one. Do you ‘Go Forward’, ‘Grow Stronger’ or ‘Go For Change’?

What to do with the wife? Keeping her snuggled among the masses is barely an option any more. She has to come on stage – but do you go for a gentle peck on the cheek, a kiss on the lips or a full-on grope (be warned – Cameron generally goes for the latter).

And, then, whom do you get to endorse you? In recent years, the Tories have given guest slots to John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bono. Labour plumped for Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton and, um, Bono. Quite how Bono managed to appear at both of the main party conferences in one year is anyone’s guess. He defines chutzpah to me: not so much U2 as “you two-faced…”

Are there any parts of the speech the leader actually has to worry about any more? You’d be forgiven for thinking not. After all, do you remember anything of Cameron’s 2010 speech, or Brown in 2008? I didn’t think so. But there are, however, three ingredients that remain essential, which every leader must guarantee that he throws into the final mix if he wants to give the TV channels all they need for the evening news.

First is the soundbite. In the build-up to the speech, the press will invariably have picked out some issue that it sees as the biggest test facing the leader – some contrived battle or other. The leader’s job is to come up with a soundbite that roundly and decisively ends the conflict in their favour. Sometimes, the conflict is with a faction of his own party. For instance, Margaret Thatcher slapped down the wets in her party with her infamous ‘lady not for turning’ soundbite – which was almost the ultimate conference put-down.

Gordon Brown slapped down David Miliband’s leadership bid that never was with the bruising, “This is no time for a novice.” And, most gloriously of all, in 1985, Neil Kinnock slapped down the Militant Tendency, furiously condemning the “grotesque chaos of a Labour council… hiring taxis to scuttle around a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers”.

Sometimes the big soundbites are pointed at the opposition. In 1999, Blair attacked “the forces of conservatism”. Iain Duncan Smith, in 2003, rather pathetically announced: “The quiet man is here to stay and he’s turning up the volume.” Then in 2007 Cameron challenged Brown: “Let the people decide. Call that election. We will fight. Britain will win.”

Then there’s ‘the joke’. Jokes can be great for diffusing difficult situations, such as when Blair dealt with the scandal about Cherie calling Brown a liar by quipping: “At least I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door.”

Last year, Cameron mocked Eric Pickles, joshing about how the ‘big man’ had “hit the ground sprinting” as communities secretary. [Pickles responded by shooting him a look only marginally less threatening than the Miliband exchange.]

Let’s be honest, these jokes aren’t really funny. They’re conference jokes. They’re simply vehicles to make the audience laugh. They sound like a joke, they’re structured like a joke, so the audience responds by laughing. But if anyone said anything like this in a pub, at a dinner party or on the phone, no one would laugh.

The third ingredient is the story: the small symbolic stories that encapsulate the message. Sometimes these are contrived, sometimes not, but they invariably lead the press’s reporting, giving the media the vital human interest angle it’s so desperate to find.

Blair famously did this in his 1996 conference speech, when he talked about the exact moment he knew the 1992 election was lost. “I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra. He was a self-employed electrician. His Dad always voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing quite nicely. ‘So I’ve become a Tory,’ he said.”

Cameron conjured up a similarly powerful story in his 2010 speech, summing up people’s willingness to dig deep to help the country out of its troubles. “I got a letter from a six-year-old girl, called Niamh, with a pound coin stuck to it. And there was a note from her mum, which said, ‘Dear Mr Cameron… after hearing about the budget, Niamh wanted to send you her tooth fairy money to help.’ There we are, George – nearly there. Niamh: thank you.”

The soundbites, jokes and stories are the bits that matter. Most politicians worth their salt can come up with all of that on a single rainy afternoon. Their staff can and will fill the rest up with the usual guff: straw-man arguments, stats ad nauseam, achievements, boasts, corny soundbites about going forwards, not backwards, and the appalling management jargon about ‘service providers’, ‘stakeholders’ and ‘delivery’.
It’s painful seeing warm, funny people deliver this drivel. Really, the sooner we get Piers Morgan in to prise some really good stuff out of them, the better.

Happily, despite all this piffery, you do still, every decade or so, get the odd great speech, which provides insight into the leader’s real character. Like in 1984, when Margaret Thatcher came out fighting, just hours after the Grand Hotel had been blown apart by the IRA. Or in 2000, when Blair worked himself into such a frenzy in his speech, following his government’s first wrong steps, that he soaked his shirt with sweat.

Maybe this will be just such a year. We can but hope. I’ll be watching just in case – but with the sound down, of course.