Leader: David Cameron is off script, on message
David Cameron yesterday gave a deconstructed speech to suit a rootless world, an audacious attempt to give purpose to his politics by defining himself as the liberating voice of a new generation. No one could question his courage, speaking fluently for more than an hour without a script, his audience waiting anxiously for a pause or a slip that never came. Nor could they doubt his commitment to changing the way his party is seen and some of what it stands for. This was the speech of a moderniser every bit as determined as he was two years ago when he won his job with another impromptu talk in Blackpool.
For all the bravery, there is much that is still incomplete about the Conservative project of regeneration. Mr Cameron set himself a tremendous task yesterday - to explain the direction in which he intends to take the country and to prove himself capable of putting that into effect - and he made progress with it. Forgoing the rhetorical tricks of a traditional conference script, he sounded as much marketing manager as chief executive, but in his best passages he found a conversational, rational tone that washed away a little of the posturing that has beset all three pre-election party conferences this season. He did well to ask his party to understand why exactly Labour had failed, rather than assume that it had failed simply because it was Labour; on a recent speech by Ed Balls he said "I could have made it myself". He admitted too, as few Tories are prepared to do in public, that "our economy is getting richer". There was nothing boastful about his language, promising to deal with immigration in a "reasonable, humane and sensible way". All this was welcome. But such open intelligence was not always sustained, and at times Mr Cameron simply appeared to be pasting new veneer on to old ideas. Was the optimism he claimed to hold, a belief that individuals and families do best when left to themselves, anything more than an old Conservative distrust of the state, as much a cause of as a solution to the problems he described?
Perhaps not - but for Mr Cameron this may not matter. He tried to show his party that his intentions and theirs are not so very different; that worrying about social breakdown or climate change is not an un-Conservative act. In a speech that at times dropped into a series of nods to policy areas he thought it necessary to mention, the Tory leader did not quite lift the hall into a shared understanding of what he is about. But he did stick to theme, to "trust people to do more themselves", and at his strongest he showed what this might mean in action. His emphasis on responsibility and decentralisation and his remarks on the red tape in policing will strike a chord. He spoke well on the environment: "Some say it is not popular to talk about green issues. I don't care, it's right and it falls to my generation." But after a week that saw the environment slip down the party agenda, Mr Cameron should have said more.
Conservatives have had a cheering week, better than Gordon Brown may have expected. The party does not expect to win an immediate general election, but it will at least enter one determined to fight and with some optimism about the potency of the ideas it offers. Great contradictions remain in the Tory message: Mr Cameron called for both a right to flexible working and the abolition of the European social chapter, which offers such rights. There was a sharp and disturbing difference in tone, too, between Mr Cameron's centrism and more full-throated rightwingery from other frontbench speakers. He spoke little about economics, retaining the urge to spend more and tax less, which is impossible. All these are weaknesses that Labour will expose. But if Mr Brown does what is now expected, and calls a contest next week, he will face energetic opposition from a party leader who not long ago appeared to be out for the count.