Political leaders' speeches to their parties 2011

Mediocre, but instructive

By Richard Heller

The three party conferences of 2011 are over, and even political anoraks are relieved. It is a poor commentary on all Britain’s professional politicians that the most memorable speaker from all three parties was a 16-year-old schoolboy.

None of the party leaders distinguished themselves in their conference speeches – although there were instructive features in all three.

Nick Clegg's speech was the most focused. He concentrated overwhelmingly on reassuring his shaken party that it had done the right thing in joining the coalition and that it had made a real difference to the government. His speech therefore had far more policy content than those of the other two leaders, and it consisted largely of an earnest recital of achievements which could be identified with the Liberal Democrats.

The penalty for this approach was boredom – Clegg's list did not make any emotional connection even to his own followers in the hall, let alone to apathetic and disenchanted voters outside it.

Seeking to inject urgency into his speech, Clegg adopted Tony Blair's irritating habit of verbless sentences. Used sparingly, these can achieve surprise and a change of tempo and give audiences something to remember. Use them repeatedly, as Clegg did, and they draw attention to themselves as a spurious device. If you want to make a speech go quicker, it is better to cut entire passages rather than pick off a few lonely verbs.

Ed Miliband needed to make a real impact in his speech to his Conference. His biggest task was to make himself interesting to the British people, and his second was to give them some reason to believe that he would govern them well. For me, he did not succeed in either task, as you can see in my instant critique on www.politics.co.uk.

Like Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband made little or no emotional connection with his audiences inside or outside the conference hall. I might have been unfair to contrast him with Bill Clinton, a politician of supernatural empathy, but Ed Miliband made people's present pain sound like a research finding. Above all the speech did little to show the British people why they would be better off under an Ed Miliband government.

The speech gave itself one major problem: far too much was expressed in negative terms. Time and time again, Ed Miliband defined himself by what he was against, or who he was not, or what he was not going to do. Negative statements invariably have far less colour and drama than positive ones, and in Ed Miliband's speech their proliferation left vital questions unanswered: what are you for, who are you and what are you going to do?

David Cameron had a tough job in his speech to his Party Conference: to look as though he is still in command of events, especially on the economy, when he so clearly is not.

He almost succeeded with the help of an ancient oratorical trick, which is called "fighting the man of straw." Throughout the speech, David Cameron constantly invented imaginary foes and wrestled them fearlessly to the ground. Conversely, he cast himself as the champion of a series of admired policies or people. All of these pieces of theatre had a single plotline: Cameron’s in charge. Read my analysis of Cameron's technique on www.politics.co.uk.

The speech zipped from topic to topic. Normally, this is not recommended technique for speechmakers, since it leaves audiences to struggle with too much information and too many messages. But in Cameron's case, it was probably deliberate – to stop people thinking too long about the economy. With nothing good to say about the economy, and not one helpful fact to quote, he was reduced to Tony Blair's mantra with the claim that his policy "was the right thing to do." Unfortunately, most voters stopped believing Tony Blair some time ago.

All three party leaders stuffed their speeches with far too many political bromides, which have now lost all power to create either emotion or belief. Nick Clegg had a particularly egregious example and he made it worse by repeating it constantly: not the easy decision but the right one. By using stale politician-language all three ruined their perorations, which needed to stir hearts and fill minds.

Clegg made the mistake of quoting the simple, vigorous slogan on the "peace wall" after the riots in Peckham "our home, our children, our future" and putting a hackneyed gloss on it: "this is our future. We start building it today." Ed Miliband spoke of "fulfilling the promise of Britain" and "a new bargain". David Cameron said "Our plan is to build something new and to build something better."

Comedians have scoffed at this kind of oratory for hundreds of years. Why do politicians imagine that it will work any better today?