In 1984, at the Buxton Pavilion, I witnessed something that changed my life for ever. It was a woman called Ann Brennan, whom I had never met before and have hardly seen since, making a speech using phrases I can’t recall on a topic that I have completely forgotten.

What was memorable about the Brennan address was only this: she had never delivered a speech before, yet she obtained a standing ovation. And it turned out afterwards that she had been trained how to do this by the presentation guru Max Atkinson. He was making a TV documentary, you see, to show how certain rhetorical techniques can rouse a party conference audience. Ann Brennan proved his point.

While Brennan made me stand up, Atkinson made me sit up (I know, you can’t do both at the same time. The second is a metaphor, but thank you for your input.) I began to learn how to craft a speech to win an ovation.

You can surf the applause, talking while the conference claps (Gordon Brown did this at his party conference and they all duly stood); you can praise the audience (George Osborne applauded local councillors, and they applauded him back); you can use a list to get automatic applause even when the audience doesn’t agree (as Michael Heseltine famously did when he got the Tories to clap his promise to “intervene before breakfast, before lunch, before tea and before dinner”). And there are plenty of other techniques. In other words, if you know what you are doing, you can get an audience to clap pretty much anything.

And David Cameron does know what he is doing. The very first time I met him, nearly two decades ago, we discussed how to polish some speech lines he was working on to win applause at a party conference. So when he got the Conservative conference to rise to its feet to support his pledge to help the poor, was technique all there was to it?

Perhaps you recall the moment. “Excuse me? Who made the poorest poorer? Who left youth unemployment higher? Who made inequality greater? [There you go, a list, the applause starts.] No, not the wicked Tories. You, Labour: you’re the ones that did this to our society. [The clapping builds, but he presses on, surfing the applause.] So don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative Party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.” [He praises the audience and they give him a standing ovation.] So was that it, then? A tricksy bit of speech-making by an old pro to get right-wing people to clap helping the poor, and make the party look good with swing voters. Well, there was a bit of that, of course. But there was more, too. Mr Cameron’s clap lines had a decade-long history organisationally, and an even longer one intellectually. The party faithful clapped because they really do believe they have a responsibility for the poor, and they really do think they would be better at helping them than Labour has been.

I’ll tell you how it happened. Tim Montgomerie — one of the most important Conservative activists of the past 20 years — is best known in Tory circles for setting up the ConservativeHome website. But however well that site does, his work there may, in the end, take second place to the impact he made as founder of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.

With the same organisational genius he later brought to ConservativeHome, Montgomerie used the fellowship to revive the tradition of earlier Tory evangelicals such as William Wilberforce, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Richard Oastler, men who made the condition of the poor their priority. A social action project — Renewing One Nation — was established that brought Iain Duncan Smith face to face with the plight of the vulnerable, with drug addiction and with failing estates.

Montgomerie briefly served as IDS’s political secretary and then, broadening from the evangelical base, helped to found the Centre for Social Justice. Compassion for the poor and anger at poverty landed in the mainstream of Tory politics. It was a brilliant organisational coup. And it helps to explain Mr Cameron’s statement and the audience reaction to it.

But the “poverty moment” has an intellectual history too. Some of it is familiar. Mr Cameron’s rather too sweeping attacks on big government have their roots in the neoconservative critique of welfare policy by American writers such as Charles Murray and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They argued that the perverse incentives of the welfare state undermined responsibility (another favourite Cameron word). And these ideas were in currency during the Major Government. As was the emphasis on marriage.

To this has been added less familiar thinking. “Compassionate Conservatives” (the vogue phrase) believe in handing power to local, primarily voluntary, projects that tackle many social problems at the same time. They work to help the “whole person” rather than to spend the money of traditional departments in traditional ways.

This week, the Nobel Prize for Economics went to Elinor Ostrom. for her work on how local voluntary bodies can govern common resources (fisheries, irrigation systems and so on) better than either government bodies or private companies. Her best-known book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, travels the world, providing case studies of communities outperforming formal government intervention.

Ostrom is part of the Bloomington School that argues for the importance of customs, traditions and a shared sense of fair play in administering social policy.

It is still cutting-edge stuff. And that is the real question over Mr Cameron’s very welcome (in my view) “poverty moment”. Not that he didn’t mean it, not that the party didn’t mean it, but whether its novel theories about community deliver all that their advocates hope.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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