This was supposed to be the speech that ‘sealed the deal’, the last big chance before the election to show Britain why it should vote for him rather than merely against Gordon Brown. He blew it. It was vague, woolly, bland, dull. Far from igniting with the passion of a moral cause, it read like a mechanical assembly of boxes to be ticked. There was hardly any sense of the urgent civilisational threats and challenges to this country. He started with Afghanistan – good – but there was zero sense of the urgency of the mission, more an irritation that this was a task which we needed to undertake but weren’t doing properly. True enough – but there was no attempt to tell people why it is so necessary that we stay the course, merely a wholly inadequate observation that We are there to stop the re-establishment of terrorist training camps. Well actually we are there to defeat the Taleban in order to stop them from getting their hands on Pakistan’s nukes. Which is why it’s not just that we need to send more soldiers to train more Afghans to deliver the security we need. Then we can bring our troops home. A statesman-in-waiting would have done what the government has so conspicuously failed to do (and what the shadow defence secretary Liam Foxdid try to do in his own speech today, which is likely to be buried by the Leader’s speech in the media coverage) – that is, explain to the mystified and dangerously apathetic or even hostile British people why this is not a faraway war in which we should never have got involved but one upon which the security of the region and the free world depends, and that we have to see it throughhowever long it takes. As for making General Dannatt a Tory peer, what utterly appalling judgment on all sides. The British military should be totally independent of party politics, and be seen to be so. By sitting on the Tory benches and even prospectively accepting a role in a Tory government, Dannatt has not only at a stroke retrospectively tainted every judgment he made as a commanding officer, but also sown the seeds of suspicion that all the armed forces top brass are now politicised. That Cameron didn’t grasp how this would weaken the credibility of the armed forces is a dismaying blot on his own judgment. As for the rest of the speech, parts of it were incoherent. He can’t be againstbig government but also ‘the party of the NHS’. He can’t be for devolution andfor the union which it is weakening. He can’t be for the minimum wage and also free up entrepreneurialism to create desperately needed jobs. He can’t be forresponsibility in family life by giving financial incentives for marriage and giving financial incentives for civil partnerships whose fundamental premise is that marriage is not a unique institution with unique privileges and duties defining its unique role in safeguarding family life, but that its privileges can be detached from those duties and given to others. Either he’s running scared of the Guardianistas and the BBC -- or worse, he agrees with them. Much of the rest was studiedly vague and took the form of empty statements that welfare dependency would end, people would be protected from crime and would get what they wanted from the school system. On terrorism, there was simply this: We understand too the grave responsibility we will have to protect our people from terrorism. This party knows only too well the pain and grief that terrorism brings. Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day on the Thursday night of our party conference in Brighton, the IRA exploded a bomb that injured and killed good friends and colleagues. Today let us honour their memory and send our thoughts and best wishes to all those, including Margaret Tebbit, who still bear the scars of that terrible night. The acknowledgement of Margaret Tebbit’s terrible injury at the hands of the IRA was gracious and decent. But given the enormous threat this country faces from Islamic terror, what a remarkable display of funk that he chose to refer instead to an Irish terrorist campaign that is now over. Of course, it can justly be said that the policy details have been spelt out during the week by a plethora of shadow ministers. Such as Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, whose speech on education yesterday was masterly. If Gove manages to do what he has set himself to do, he will be a hero. For he didn’t just talk about changing structures – although, as in his school choice policy, that’s certainly there too even though it could in itself go further – but, crucially, that he would set himself to tackle head on the defeatism, the political correctness and the entrenched culture of dumbing down that is at the heart of our educational establishment. Gove has understood that for his reforms to succeed, he has to change an entire culture, an orthodoxy that has wrecked the teaching profession. A tall order indeed; but the fact that he has grasped the full enormity of what it is that he is up against, and its lethal consequences for this country, is what gave his speech the emotion and sincerity that made it so arresting. He made the case, in other words, why it is important for the future of education in Britain that Michael Gove should be elected. And that is what was missing from Cameron’s speech. It’s not that it was short on policy detail, which was not its role anyway. It’s that it didn’t tell us a story that made us say yes, this man really does grasp not just the economic debacle but the full extent of Britain’s cultural, moral and existential decline – and that it is important that we elect him in order to reverse that decline. Instead, he played ultra-safe; and so we are left wondering even now whether he’s keeping his powder dry – or whether there isn’t any powder there.
Playing it safe
So what went wrong with David Cameron’s speech?
Friday, 9 October 2009
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