U.K Conservative Conference Is All About Leadership Contenders

Ace Breaking New – The four Conservative leadership contenders can’t afford a Conference speech slip of the 👅

It knows no party-political bias, and no party has a monopoly on it.

Speech writers hate it. Spin-doctors flap about it and it’s one of those things that give politicians nightmares. It’s hardly ever the fault of the person responsible, it’s very human and in a country famed for its sense of humour it’s often inappropriately funny.

I’m referring to accidental slips of the tongue at a key moment.

The powerful rhetoric that rewrites itself wrongly.

The inadvertent switch from gift-of-the-gab to gift of a gaffe.

For Sir Keir Starmer this week calling for the release of sausages, not hostages, was just that moment. He carried on, unfazed, much longer, but people noticed.

Now before I go on: This is not a piece about Starmer, Labour, or whether this specific slip up deserved the myriad social media quips it has spawned or the wry eyebrows it raised.

It’s about speeches.

I would much prefer Conservatives look at the many flaws and rewritings of history in the Prime Minister’s Labour Conference speech. I’d rather urge them to take him seriously to task for his “just blame the Tories for everything” lines – than focus on a word that wasn’t in the script and was never meant to be.

I absolutely join with the PM, and indeed the last Conservative Government in urging the Hamas terrorists that still hold Israeli hostages to release every one of them. Their plight is no laughing matter and hasn’t been for nearly a year.

But like glitter – that Starmer metaphorically shook off rather well at the time – the label of a gaffe within a serious speech can be infuriatingly difficult to fully remove afterwards. Sometimes they can hang around with all the persistence of a goosegrass seed on a woolly sock.

They’re a constant irritation rather than catastrophe – but they can count.

When Jeremy Paxman asked Ed Miliband, should he become Prime Minister in 2015, whether he had what it took to face down a dictator like Putin, Miliband was ready, and the line was a good one. The build-up, which I’m betting nobody now remembers, was solid and the argument was heading to his punchline.

The problem was, whilst he eventually got to “Hell yes I’m tough enough” – just before, his mouth had taken a detour through “Am I tuss, enuss?”

Small slip, long life, really damaged the impact for him in a key moment on a key question.

And I said I wasn’t just focussed on Labour.

I know Theresa May gave her team a massive headache on stage in 2017, which wasn’t what she said. She was losing her voice, had a bad cold, and was offered a cough sweet by the then Chancellor before a comedian disrupted her to give her a P45, and some lettering fell off the backdrop.

A perfect storm, that seemed to encapsulate something, certainly to her opponents and the media.

I know you’ll remember all that, but what her team remembers was that this crucial set piece was meant to be about restoring her authority, but few can now pinpoint her theme.

I looked it up.

She vowed to “renew the British dream”.

Sound familiar? 😜

Perhaps we can ponder the similarity of wording as we are forced to await the Starmer “national renewal” service from Liverpool to Westminster that is now delayed by approximately years. Labour do not apologise for any inconvenience caused: “Taxpayers are reminded there is no buffet car available on this bandwagon, but free stuff will be available to all the service operating staff.”

Put that in a speech. 👅👅👅🤷🤟🥴

This weekend the Conservative Party Conference starts in Birmingham.

For four Conservative MPs, surviving leadership candidates and in the end ordinary human beings, with nerves and huge pressures on them, there is an awful lot riding on their Conference performances.

The fallout from an inadvertent slip up will carry far more risk than it has for the PM.

He had a stage and, from it, a media platform, all to himself. I think it’s fair to assume that after the election defeat, any Conservative Leader’s speech would have gotten less attention, but there isn’t be one anyway. The Leader won’t be there on Wednesday.

As one party member told me: “at least Rishi will have left a Conference from a city HS2 actually will get to”.

Instead it’s a new speech format: we have a Wednesday high stakes session of rhetorical roulette.

As the interim Chairman informed readers, the four candidates will get 20 mins to deliver what is frankly – the speech of their life. They won’t need reminding; a sausage-esque slip-up is the last thing they need. But nerves are nerves, and they’ll need to hold theirs.

It’ll be a tough crowd.

The party is still shaken and upset by July. It wants answers and it wants a bit of humility and understanding. It needs words that will move, motivate and make them feel better. About themselves, their party and its future.

They want a vision.

One that counters Starmer’s, that is solidly Conservative, fresh, and appealing. They want to hear it from someone, who looks the part and offers new ideas for the road back to power.

They’ll want to believe there is more to the words than just words.

Frankly, if the four aren’t rehearsing and rewriting it, honing and timing it, toning and harmonising it, they should start right now – but I bet they are. I’ve been there before as part of the process.

It’s like coaching for the olympics: the search for tiny advantages that add up to an indefinable edge when the moment comes.

And when they’re practising aloud, if they don’t explore all the rhetorical gears that make a speech really count, then that could, if it shows to the audience, say more about them than what they say, cometh the hour – or the 20 minutes.

They’ll all want to avoid the moment in 2005 when David Davis finished a better speech than people remember by having to indicate to the audience with his hands that it was time to stand up and clap.

No pressure then.

Of course Wednesday is not their only speaking engagement over the four days.

On Sunday night ConservativeHome hosts, with the 1922 Committee, a gathering that will hear from Rob, Kemi, James and Tom, but this time, it’s a minute each. There is of course in politics an interesting scientific question whether in the heat of a contest a candidate-minute bears any relation to an actual minute?

We shall see.

On Monday and Tuesday the respective teams will be trying to get their candidates to as many events as they can to meet as many people as they can, and get their own pitch heard by the wider party, face to face. Sometimes meeting someone, seeing them up close can change a mind. One way or another.

The media will be hungrily looking for any gaps, hints, or mistakes to see if anyone can build a lead, or fall away, in a contest that is still far from clear cut, or over.

Will the Cameron factor play out and a speech makes the difference? Maybe.

My real fear, expressed here some weeks ago, has not abated though.

Technically the audience that will really count is still the 121 Conservative MPs. 119 if we assume the Chairman and Rishi Sunak will still not be voting in rounds three and four.

Party members who might be completely wowed by one or two of the candidates’ performances may still never get to vote for them when MPs vote four down to two the week after.

That frustration, for members, could still be the inbuilt slip-up rather than anybody’s speech.

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