WintonsWeek Empty-Vessel Cameron Is The New Blair Or Is He Bill Clinton In Disguise? You Want Charisma, Speeches Without Notes? Try Kenneth Branagh “I think we lost our title as the nasty party when new Labour’s Fascists roughed up an old man for daring to question Gauleiter Straw” David Cameron must have made two speeches to the Conservative Party conference, because the one I listened to, with increasing queasiness ending in nausea, couldn’t surely have been the same one which was greeted with such hysteria by the media. The David Cameron speech that I listened to showed a politician so blatantly on the make, so desperate for advancement, but so empty of content, that it sounded like Tony Blair without the principles. This was a Bill Clinton moment for me. When I first saw Clinton in action, in the early 1990s, the man reeked of opportunism. He was so obviously a snake-oil salesman. And yet he had quite the reverse effect on many people who should have known better. David Cameron seems to have the same kind of power over the vulnerable. The media has decided that David Cameron is the coming man and should be the next leader of the Conservative Party. Any other outcome will not be tolerated. But let’s take a look at what he said, and compare it with the other contenders. I’ve just read the speech in cold print and it says absolutely nothing. Merely warm words and hopes. No mention of difficult issues like Iraq, which Liam Fox so bravely and effectively tackled in his speech. And yes, the section which tipped my queasiness into nausea was there, when he blatantly exploited the plight of his crippled child for political gain, again, to induce sympathy from the audience. Cameron does this at every opportunity. You would think that this would make people squirm. It does me. He capped this by calling his pregnant wife on to the stage and patting her bump as if to say, oh, I don’t know what he was trying to do. Maybe he was trying to induce a national vomit moment. Messiah And then the media greets all this as though the Messiah has appeared, and suggests that the Conservative Party front-runners with experience and bottle like David Davies and Liam Fox should roll over and die. Cameron apparently wants to introduce quotas to ensure a better balance of minorities and women candidates. For proper conservatives, this is anathema. Advancement must always be on merit. Never at the expense of those better qualified. In an interview on Radio 4’s Today Programme before his great speech, Cameron talked about the Conservative “brand” and that does tell you all you wish to know about the man. Even James Naughtie picked this up immediately as the “dread word brand”. Vacuous Cameron is a vacuous man with no guiding principles, who talks in management clichés and opaque jargon. According to Bruce Anderson in the latest issue of The Spectator, “Cameron is one of the most important politicians of the early 21st Century and is heading for No 10”. You cannot be serious, Bruce! If all Conservatives want is an attractive looking man who can turn on the charm, they might as well go for someone like Kenneth Branagh. He could talk with affected emotion, without autocue and notes, and wow an audience. Does the Tory party really want another Blair-equivalent actor manager who will talk a good game but never deliver? The party conference, it seemed to me, showed the best and the worst of the Tories. We started off with the worst. The useless hand-wringer Francis Maude started off the proceedings telling the audience how terrible they were and how they must change or die. Doesn’t this man know that the Tories won the popular vote in England at the general election in May? The dripping wet Maude repeated his cringing apologies on BBCTV’s Question Time last Friday. No spark. No belief. No charm. Only an irresistible urge to apologise. Why did Michael Howard appoint this man? I suppose he must have seemed good compared with the pointless Theresa May. Nasty Party No Longer I noticed that in the previous week’s Radio 4 Any Questions programme, May blew her chance to bury forever her stupid remark about Tories being the nasty party, by failing to say something like – “I think we lost our title as the nasty party when new Labour’s Fascists roughed up an old man for daring to question Gauleiter Straw” or something like that. Continuing with the worst of the conference, Kenneth Clarke continued his losing battle for the leadership. How Clarke loves the limelight, but he must know this is his last hurrah. Nobody who exploits the war in Iraq for his own selfish ends is going to win this contest, even if he wasn’t a Euromaniac. Disjointed Delivery David Davies made a workmanlike speech, pressing all the right buttons, and telling an interesting story about his under-class past. I liked his line – “So I wasn't born a Conservative. I chose to be a Conservative.” Davies’ speech was curiously ill-timed. He seemed unable to synchronise his pauses for applause and this led to a disjointed delivery. But it is ludicrous to suggest that his leadership campaign crashed and burned. That’s just media childish over-reaction. Liam Fox did his campaign a bit of good with his speech. I first heard Fox live at a local association meeting during the last election campaign. Michael Howard had not only just fired our local MP Howard Flight, but destroyed his Parliamentary career, in a ridiculous and panicky over-reaction to a new-Labour inspired piece of mis-information in the Times newspaper, that craven, dishonest new-Labour organ. I expected a least a hint of apology from Fox, who was speaking as party chairman. There came no such hint, so I’m not inclined to support the man, but his speech to the conference was superb, particularly the section on Iraq. Fox has sounded a bit feeble on Kyoto (but not as defeatist as Michael Howard, who would have had us sign up hook, line and sinker to this economy destroying and climate neutral treaty) and I’d be reasonably happy for him to lead the party if Davies did fail. Hague’s The One The highlight of the conference was William Hague’s speech. This was typically funny and hard-hitting. “Blair last week, pathetically calling for reform after eight wasted years, was banning junk food while being the master-chef of junk policy himself: a sprinkle of free market reform; a heap of state intervention, such as £1 billion wasted on failed truancy policies; a dollop of welfare reform, like the failed New Deal; a portion of meddling such as the botched tax credits; a dash of social engineering, like the multi-billion Sure Start flop; a spoonful of grand pledges like saving the NHS'. “All mixed together with a handful of preposterous nonsense like the ban on cooing at newborn babies, glazed with an artificial, saccharine New Labour dressing - and producing a foul-tasting failure of a kitchen nightmare that Gordon Ramsey couldn't sort out, let alone Gordon Brown.” Conservatives can only hope that he returns to the front bench soon because he is surely the most talented of aspirants and if he gets his commitment to politics back, will surely grace No 10 one day. Got that Bruce? Hague not Cameron. Neil Winton – October 10, 2005 Top