Watching David Cameron’s speech at the Conservative Spring Conference was a slightly strange experience. The words came out but they were just that – words. There was an absence of passion, and only at the end, when there was a desultory attack on Labour did he become at all passionate and animated. But even then you got the feeling that the Prime Minister was going through the motions. He was making the speech because he had to rather than because he really wanted to. I have never seen a Conservative leader make a speech on the morning of a Saturday of the Spring conference. He would normally make the closing speech. It bore all the hallmarks of “let’s get this over with and then get the hell outta here”.
The main part of the speech was an appeal for Britain to become an “aspiration nation”, a country where everyone can reach there potential. It doesn’t matter where you’ve come from – blah, blah blah. All fine, as far as it goes. The trouble is that we have heard it all before from the likes of John Major and Iain Duncan Smith, so he’s hardly being original. And the other observation I would make is that virtually every word of the passage on aspiration could have been uttered by Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband. No politician is ever going to say aspiration is a bad thing, so it was a speech laden with motherhood and apple pie. What Conservative activists want is to hear how their party is different from the other two. They want a message they can spread on the doorstep. Telling Mrs Miggins at 32 Acacia Avenue that Conservatives believe in aspiration is not the sort of thing which will get her juices flowing, or get her down the polling station in May 2015.
If you asked 100 people what aspiration means, how many of them could tell you without hesitating? It’s an awkward word. Alex Smith said on Twitter that he should use the word ‘hope’ instead. He may have a point.
But if David Cameron wants to get his activists back on side and ready for the fight, he’ll need to do a damn sight better than he did this morning.
