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For a communications technology used by Cicero, political speeches are remarkably resilient.
They are still seen as key indicators for a politician's success or failure, hence the accepted wisdom this week that Gordon Brown had to give the speech of a lifetime.
They are analysed at length. The trouble is, they don't really work.
No speechwriter or politician, of course, would admit such a heresy. Big speeches take up an inordinate amount of time: Brown is reported to have gone through 63 drafts this week.
As a civil servant, I never worked on Blair's party political material but I toiled for hours in hotel rooms and on trains and planes on many other of his speeches, re-casting, incorporating his endless fountain-pen additions, building up, cutting back. All that agony of composition - for nothing?
Of course Brown's speech mattered. But the fact that it ended up being pretty good - reasonably well crafted at the start, at least, and slightly less of a laundry list than usual - was important mainly to the audience in the hall.
It reassured the party faithful, touching well-loved buttons like the NHS and Tory cuts.
Aside from them and the media, though, very few people will have seen more than a few clips on the evening news.
And so it has been for the whole of the television age: the time when politicians needed to be good orators in order to speak to their electors directly is long gone.
For a conference speech to have a meaningful effect on public opinion - as opposed to adding a couple of per cent to the party's poll ratings because they've been on TV all week - it has to have real content. That's hard.
A big announcement like George Osborne's bombshell over inheritance tax in 2007, formulated without the constraints of Whitehall planning, can make a splash.
But given the labyrinthine nature of policy-making in government, prime ministers normally find it hard to announce anything very interesting to ordinary voters.
Tinkering with childcare payments and care arrangements for the elderly, as Brown promised this week, will simply go past most people.
The essentially internal function of most political speeches isn't to be dismissed.
At the 2005 Tory party conference David Davis, the clear front-runner for the leadership, blew it by giving a typically lazy, self-satisfied speech, while underdog David Cameron turned in a barnstorming performance. It tipped the balance and Cameron won.
Far more often, though, even for internal audiences, speeches really just confirm what you knew already about a politician's grip and character.
Brown didn't manage to dispel the impression this week that he's an inflexible man who doesn't listen - but anyone who has ever heard him interviewed on the Today programme knew that long ago.
Likewise, I remember standing in Blackpool cringing as the hapless Iain Duncan Smith delivered his grindingly embarrassing speech to the Tory conference in October 2003 - "the quiet man is turning up the volume!". He was gone within weeks - but he'd been a dead man walking for months.
And while I stood in the same hall in 1996, genuinely impressed by Tony Blair's upbeat speech - "education, education, education" and his dream of a young country - he had looked like a winner against an exhausted Tory government for a year by then.
So can David Cameron's speechwriters take it easy this weekend? Alas not. His speech might not matter much to voters or indeed his election chances but it matters to his party, his rivals and the media. And most politicians really do like nothing better than the sound of their own voices.
Andrew Neather was speechwriter to Jack Straw, David Blunkett and Tony Blair from 2000-02.
Reader views (1)
Perhaps Bob Ainsworth's speechwriters should in future avoid the opportunity for their man to drop three haitches in quick succession as in his speech today "the MOD 'as 'elicoptors in 'ampshire".
Perhaps his name is really Hainsworth but he has never got the correct spelling across.
Alan John
- Alan John, Meopham , Kent, 01/10/2009 14:48
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