Call me old fashioned, but I really don't get this "I went to an even more ordinary school than you did" stuff that we're being promised from the leader of the Labour Party in his speech later today.
Nor do I get why he's apparently going to tell us (yet again) the story of his parents' flight from the Nazis and their successful upwardly mobile life in Britain.
The point, Mr Miliband, is that none of us has any control over who our parents were, or where they came from or which school they decided to send us to when we were children - whether our surname happens to be Cameron, Clegg or Miliband.
Nor, dare I say it, is your attempt to affiliate with the ordinary very convincing when the school in question turns out to be Haverstock Comprehensive, which strikes me (who went to a prep school in Doncaster) as being rather close to a posh suburb called 'Hampstead'.
The embourgeoisment of the Labour Party may have become a source of embarrassment to all you MPs who've been parachuted into safe Northern seats. But is all this "more ordinary than thou" a sensible way to address the problem?
James Forsyth's assessment of Ed Balls as "a vastly improved platform speaker" (Spectator) was quite widely echoed by other journalists today on Twitter.
Michael Crick of Channel 4 News (@MichaelLCrick) told us that Mr Balls had "rehearsed his speech in his hotel room with an ironing board" - adding, rather unkindly: "which may explain why, in the end, it was a bit flat."
Looking on a brighter side, I think it's quite impressive these days to hear that our politicians take the trouble to rehearse their speeches at all, especially when they've taken the apparently daring decision to use a hard copy script rather than read from an Autocue.
But there were two things about this particular speech that puzzled me:
First, quite a few tweets on Twitter noticed and commented on the Labour Party's unexplained decision to abandon a red background completely in favour of making it look as though they'd stolen the Conservative's erstwhile monopoly on blue.
Second, although I can see why today's Labour hierarchy prefer saying "conference" to "comrades" (as in the past) was it really necessary for Mr Balls to repeat the word 33 times during his speech - especially when both words draw attention to the fact that he has trouble saying his 'r's and pronounces the words as "confwence" and 'comwades"?
For me, at least, I found the excessive, and in my view pointless, repetition of "confwence" so distracting and annoying that I stopped watching the speech when he was only about half way through - which is presumably not what he hopes for from his audiences.
In previous years, I've criticised Nick Clegg (and/or those advising him) for the decision to go for the management guru stye of delivery in his leader's speech - i.e. wandering around the stage pretending that he's not using a teleprompter.
So the big plus this year was to see the Deputy Prime Minister looking rather more statesmanlike than usual by the simple device of staying firmly at the lectern.
But there's another important lesson he still has to learn: if a particular line goes down well with your audience, don't comment on it or otherwise draw attention to it.
This particular joke (scroll in about 20 seconds) was, perhaps predictably, the first sound bite from the speech to be tweeted by BBC television's @daily_politics shoe - and will probably make it on to some of tonight's prime-time news programmes.
It was so successful that it triggered a massive 23 seconds of applause (i.e. 15 seconds more than the standard 8 seconds burst).
But surely it's far better to leave the audience to draw their own (positive) conclusions about what they've just seen and heard than to comment on the difference between what you'd expected and what had happened. All that achieves is to highlight the scripted calculated nature of the line in question - and perhaps also gives away that there'd been a good deal of discussion about it beforehand with your aides:
"I thought you'd groan rather than clap at that one, but anyway [slight laughter] what a generous audience."
It reminded me of a line Mrs Thatcher once used in the early 1980s, when she based her commendation of her foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, on a television beer advertisement of the day: "Yes, he really is the peer that reaches parts thaat other peers can't reach."
This prompted much laughter and applause, during which she could be seen (and just heard) saying "Oh, it did work, then..."
In this particular case, Nick Clegg's good luck is that, in order to include the unfortunate line, the the television news shows would have to play the whole 23 seconds of applause that comes before it - so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone other than anoraks like me (and/or readers of blogs like this one).
Unlike his audience at the Lib Dem conference, I'm not at all convinced that Vince Cable's BA from Cambridge and PhD from Glasgow qualifies him as a 'pleb'.
Nor do I think he would have got away with his attempt to affiliate with the working class if he didn't still have the remains of a Yorkshire accent...
I may have been rather critical of President Obama's rather uninspiring (for him) acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, but was rather more impressed by his performance on the David Letterman Show last night, prompting as it did an interruptive burst of applause (scroll in 40 seconds) - just after he'd used a nice simple contrast:
"My expectation is that, if you want to be President, "you got to work for everyone, not just for some, [APPLAUSE STARTS] "and thee uh--"[APPLAUSE CONTINUES]
As noted elsewhere on this blog (and in my books), the contrast is one of the most important rhetorical devices for triggering applause in political speeches. And, as is evident from this example, it can work in the same way in other settings too (e.g. TV interviews).
