Having just emerged from the hall, with dewy eyes and a soppy smile on his face, the young Environment Secretary, David Miliband, was asked what he thought of Tony Blair’s last party conference speech. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to pull himself together. “I feel like a girl who’s just been to her first rock concert.”
That was how most delegates — even critics of Blair — felt on Tuesday. “Brilliant!”, “fantastic!”, “amazing!” were all they could say about this mesmeric performance. And not far below was an undercurrent of guilt and shame. “What have we done?” they were asking themselves.
The Conservatives can’t believe their luck. One Tory texted a colleague of mine during the speech to say, “Thank God he’s going.” They won’t miss him when he’s gone, but Labour certainly will. For none of the leadership contenders, Gordon Brown included, has Blair’s extraordinary gift of being able to convert people to his cause. Conservative-inclined journalists admitted to me after the speech that they were swept away by his arguments and had to shake themselves to try to remember why it was that they used to hold a different view.
So what is it about Blair that makes him such a great communicator? Even people determined to dislike him usually find it hard to do so when they meet him in person. He has charm, a light touch and a good sense of humour. And he has a barrister’s ability to argue a persuasive case. But there is more, too.
What makes Blair more likeable than most politicians (and yes, I know, many of you still detest him and will write to tell me so, but that doesn’t invalidate the case) is that, inside, he is quite at peace with himself. He is not suppressing a roiling cauldron of negative emotions, that toxic mix of insecurity, frustration and anger that many of his colleagues display.
Gordon Brown comes across as Mr Angry. He can’t contain his frustration. You can see him biting his lip, biting his nails, frowning and scowling. John Prescott is the same. Smiling is as alien to him as using the subjunctive.
Other politicians, too, look as if their default mood is cross. They are cross because their ambitions have been thwarted, because they don’t feel sufficiently appreciated, because they can’t do exactly what they want in their departments or can’t get the money for it from the Treasury. Most of all, they are cross when they see colleagues whose genius is nothing like as soaring as theirs being promoted above them.
Blair pointedly praised ex-ministers such as Janet Anderson and George Howarth for going gracefully, unlike those such as Clare Short: “They never forgot their principles when in office; and they never discovered them when they left it.” But this sort of behaviour — so far, at least — is wholly theoretical to Blair. For the main reason why he can afford not to be Mr Angry is that he has never had to suffer from thwarted ambition.
This is a man who has achieved everything he wanted to in life, usually at the first attempt and often before he even planned it. He was given a chance to shine at a by-election as a young barrister, and then shot into a safe seat just weeks before the 1983 general election. He was swiftly promoted and, although he was frustrated at John Smith’s reluctance to modernise the party, he could hardly complain about being made Shadow Home Secretary in his thirties. Then, when Smith died, he became leader about ten years earlier than he had expected.
Winning elections has come easily to him. So has transforming his party. He may feel irritated now that Brown has forced him to leave office a few months earlier than he had planned, but this is hardly the full-blown rage that afflicts people who have spent their whole career being convinced that life is unfair to them.
We tend not to like politicians who are bitter and twisted. They make us feel uncomfortable — because they are so uncomfortable in themselves. We prefer people who are, as the French say, bien dans sa peau.
But there is one danger for such politicians, and it can be expressed in two words: William Hague. Hague was comfortable in his skin. Like Blair, he had achieved all he had hoped for, earlier than he could have expected. As a result, perhaps, he was preternaturally calm. But in the end, he failed.
As it turned out, Hague was promoted too swiftly. He would have done better to have waited ten years. Which raises the question: if the next election is a contest between Brown’s Mr Angry and David Cameron’s Mr Calm, will Cameron’s human qualities prevail? Or will we judge that the new Tory leader, though thoroughly likeable, is not yet ready for high office? In other words, is Cameron a Blair or a Hague? That’s the question that must now be gnawing at Brown.
PM's humorous masterstroke
We now know that Blair’s great gag about Cherie — “I don’t have to worry about her running off with the bloke next door” — was inspired by Les Dawson. The punchline of the Dawson version is that he misses his neighbour more than his wife, so you can see why the original version had to be changed.
But I was also told this week that Blair showed the joke to Brown a couple of minutes before going on stage. Brown tried to veto it, but Blair ignored his neighbour’s plea.
It turned out to be one of the best moments of the speech, reducing the audience to hilarity while deftly defusing the tension caused by Cherie’s alleged remarks the day before. To have left it out would have been a sin. But then, as my source added disobligingly, “We all know Gordon hasn’t got a sense of humour.”
Forget Blackpool
Queueing for the bag search to get into the conference hall and then being squished into incredibly narrow rows for Blair’s speech, we felt as if we were on an easyJet flight. The only difference was that the prevailing colour was red, not orange.
Yet even this couldn’t dim our enthusiasm for being in Manchester rather than Blackpool. Clean, comfortable hotels; a vibrant city, with great shops and restaurants; a decent secure zone with lots of space to chat and mingle. We have even had balmy sunshine rather than lashing rain and freezing gales.
If I never have to go to a party conference in Blackpool again, I shall be a very happy bunny.
