A cliche too far
I watched the Cameron speech with Roy Hattersley and Andrew Neil on the BBC's Daily Politics Show. We read the text as he spoke.
There were two things that struck us. The text said that he did not want to be Prime Minister and did not want to be President - but he actually said that he did want to be Prime Minster and did not want to be President.
The other was that in the peroration right at the end, he listed the things that mattered most to him: "Family. Community. Society. The NHS. The environment. Our quality of life." When he delivered that bit of the speech, he left out the NHS.
Petty points maybe, but worthy of comment.
Whoever wrote Cameron's Speech filled it with endless clichés. He delivered it well but with less self confidence and more shrillness than normal.
He got the message across "we care about the NHS, family, marriage and stability. We are not the same party as when I took over". But I don't think that there were any memorable lines in the speech that had not been said before by others and notably by Blair at last weeks Labour Party conference. I found the reference to his son excruciating and the reference to his grandfather cheap.
The line that struck all three of us (not because it was memorable but because we had no idea what it meant) was "rolling back the state versus rolling forward the frontier of society". I think that they are the same thing but sound as though they are opposite. It is not, as the FT reported this morning, an abandonment of Thatcherism.
To give him some credit, most of the lines were difficult to disagree with. But I would not call them motivational or uplifting, rather ordinary, flat and trite.
But the speech pleased the conference and the media thought that he did a competent job. At this stage of the electoral cycle, that's good enough.