The warm-up speech was by Margaret Aspinall, who lost her son in the Hillsborough disaster all those years ago. She was superb. Her sentences were not perfect but she was the real thing, character radiating from every pore. ‘There’s consequences if you tell lies!’ she rasped.
Margaret was a figure from Greek tragedy, a natural communicator.
The contrast with our blinking spud of a PM was embarrassing. Sir Keir Starmer lumbered on stage, clerical and boxy. His hair was scraped, the face shiny. A plodder newly released from the barber’s chair.
He did a walk of destiny, each leaden step taking him to the lectern from which, for the next grinding hour, he would pulverise the nation into a powder of boredom.
He began by patronising Mrs Aspinall and other campaigners who had just featured in a film. ‘This party,’ he squawked, ‘was founded to hear working people like that.’ He recalled his first meeting with Margaret. ‘I was humbled,’ he announced huskily. Never trust a politician who says ‘I was humbled’.
The first 20 minutes were the slowest, most inept and depressing I have known from any party leader. That includes Theresa May. He was ‘building a new Britain, a Britain built for all’.
That latter phrase was repeated eight times, each time more downbeat. If they had broadcast it from the cliffs of Dover you’d have seen rubber dinghies heading back to Calais faster than the chaps on Hawaii Five-O. Delegates were handed little flags to wave. I was again sitting next to a large bank of present and former MPs. They were clutching their flags like children on a school outing, straining forward, eager to have an excuse to flutter the things. Sir Keir’s opening salvoes gave them little to celebrate.
Sir Chris Bryant MP sagged at the shoulders. Dame Margaret Beckett chewed her cud, goatishly.
Sir Keir was droning on about how ghastly politics was, how Nigel Farage hated the country, how Labour must never defend an unpopular status quo. Pass the hemlock, Percy.
A peer sitting beside Dame Margaret jiggled his foot. He was a portly old boy, barely able to rise. His training shoes said ‘Fitville’. A nearby spin doctor was choreographing the ovations. By the time the old peer creaked to his feet the ovation had finished.
Sir Keir attacked Blairism and ‘complacent’ globalisation – speaking as if he never set foot at the globalists’ annual jamboree in Davos. He took a gulp of water and as it washed down his gullet he shot a guilty look at the audience, eyes crossed behind his wonky spectacles. The delegates wore yearning smiles. They were willing him on, hoping he could pull this terrible thing round, but optimism was fading. How small he looked.
An ovation about schools seemed to galvanise him. His voice became marginally less whiny. He stopped admitting the last Budget was hated and talked instead about the recent Norwegian order for frigates. But cliches abounded: a new chapter, a fork in the road, the tide of decline.
He had discovered – eureka – that voters were fed up with being lectured about racism. And yet he banged on at length about… racism. He marvelled that Britain was full of civic-minded mums who cleaned school uniforms and dads who ‘cut the halftime oranges’. They were there all along, even when, in opposition, he was talking down the country.
Earlier he had posed for snaps in leisure gear: a terrible black T-shirt under a trendy top. They were the sort of clothes that wives choose for their unfashionable husbands.
This speech was much the same. It was the work of others. It was moulded by focus groups and delivered by a man who doesn’t really know what he thinks.
He claims to have discovered the true people of Britain but has yet to join the dots. They are fed up with wokery and human-rights baloney and a bloated public sector, all of which Labour defends.
If he really feels strongly about such things, he should sack himself.
