Cameron's conference sound bite: 'compassionate Conservativism'

Immediately after David Cameron's leader's speech at the Tory Party conference this afternoon, Andrew Neil interviewed William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary and former party leader, on BBC's Daily Politics show.

Within a minute or two, Hague not only singled out the following line from Mr Cameron's speech, but managed to quote it twice - from which it's difficult not to conclude that this summary of 'compassionate Conservatism', expressed as a simple contrast, was the most important point that the party leadership wanted the wider public to take away from the speech:

"If you take responsibility we will reward you, and if you cannot, we will look after you."

Within the party, William Hague is regarded as 'deputy leader in all but name', and he was at the meeting where Mr Cameron was filmed working with colleagues on the speech (and put on YouTube by webcameronuk). No mention of this particular line in that rather staged piece of footage, but it's highly unlikely that it was merely coincidental that Hague mentioned it twice in quick succession at the first possible opportunity after the speech was over.

The complete sequence was actually a puzzle with a solution in the form of a contrast:

PUZZLE

Ask me what a Conservative government will stand for and it is this.

SOLUTION
[A] If you take responsibility we will reward you,
[B] and if you cannot, we will look after you.

I was wrong about Cameron looking at screens

A few days ago, I was recommending that David Cameron ought to do something to improve the way he uses the autocue/teleprompter, and stop looking at one screen for too long before looking towards the other one.

However, having watched his speech today, I realise that I've probably been wrong all along and that it's time to revise my opinion (and to apologise for my obsessive twittering on the subject).

This isn't because he'd resolved the problem, though it wasn't quite as noticeable as usual, but because, on closer examination, I'm pretty sure that he wasn't looking at any screens at all. In other words, he was was almost certainly relying on the paper script in front of him, had probably more or less memorised the whole thing in advance and only needed occasional glances down to keep himself on track.

If you watch the clip below, you'll not only see his eyes looking down at the lectern, but, when the camera pulls back to show us a wider angle, you won't see any sign at all of any autocue screens on poles (that are normally all too clearly visible). This was also true in some of the shots from behind Mr Cameron during the speech (examples of which I'll post as soon as I have them available).

What this suggests is that, like many speakers (including Margaret Thatcher and, I confess, myself), he suffers from what I've referred to in my books as 'skewed eye contact' - i.e. a natural and unconscious tendency to look at one side of the audience for far longer than at the other - an obvious disadvantage of which is that it can easily make a lot of people feel as though they're being left out.

I suppose that the reason for my mistake is that we've become so used to politicians using teleprompters that we assume they all do it, and that Mr Cameron's 'naturally' skewed eye contact gave the impression that he was doing it too.

However, although I may have been wrong about autocue screens being the cause of the problem, I still think that that he does have a problem that would be easy enough to solve - and that spreading his gaze more frequently in different directions would help him to become an even more effective orator than he already is.

Tory PR on the eve of Cameron's speech: gaffe or master stroke?

Was it an incredible gaffe or a spectacular PR coup for the Tories to reveal today that former army chief, General SIr Richard Dannatt, was being signed up for a position within the party as soon as he retires in November (HERE)?

Whatever the intention, not a single line from any of the speeches at todays party conference by shadow cabinet ministers Richerd Graylng, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt made it on to BBC Television's 10 o'clock News - the first twelve minutes of which (i.e. about 50% of the news bulletin) were entirely taken up with the Dannatt story.

Were the Tories, I wonder, delirious or despondent that the news of what had been said during the day's proceedings that was broadcast to to the mass television audience was 'nothing'? And were they equally happy to be seen to be recruiting a serving military leader because he's been critical of the way our civilian leaders (i.e. the elected government) have been handling the war effort.

PR leaks about Cameron's speech tomorrow
At the same time, the Tories have leaked some of the words (e.g. 'painful' and 'tough') that David Cameron will be using in his speech tomorrow.

And, according to Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, they've also given advance notice that he's got some biblical metaphors about climbing up mountains up his sleeve- which, though obviously borrowed from Martin Luther King and/or Barack Obama, have not so far been attributed to them in the advance press release.