Come back, Cicero. Where are you, Demosthenes? Aristotle, desert your dusty shelf for the heat of battle. The Tory leadership front-runner, David Davis, is at risk of losing the race for want of a speech. His fate is said to depend on his rhetoric. How the medieval schoolmen would have cheered.

One message echoes across the political landscape this autumn. It is that personality matters. Leadership is not about policy but about performance. The party conferences have mostly been issue-free zones. If they voted at all, nobody cared. At last British politics has been engaging with the public through the medium of human beings. Thank God for that.

In Brighton the one question on Labour lips was when will Tony Blair leave and Gordon Brown take over. Could Brown evoke public trust? Was he extrovert enough for the job? The Liberal Democrats were likewise debating their leader, Charles Kennedy. Was he too implausible, too insubstantial for high office? And what of the Tories’ fearless five in Blackpool? One was an old bruiser, another a callow youth, another pugnacious, another a gentleman, another a dark horse. Who was fit for the purpose?

We could all forget the euro or public borrowing or National Health Service reform or faith schools. Politics this autumn has been about the likeability, resonance and public appeal of named individuals. The parties have decided to go for the electorate’s heart, not its mind. Minds are for wimps and policies for nerds.

Labour understood this message from the moment it chose Blair as its leader. Drawing on American experience, he showed that the presentation of a party leader mattered far more than manifesto hogwash.

Policy was tangential to victory. Indeed, Blair made Labour eat every word that it had uttered for the previous half-century. He knew that democratic leadership must reach across the noise and clutter of formal politics and hug the public close. Voters no longer felt institutional loyalty to a party. They wanted leaders to share their pain and pleasure, or at least seem to do so.

The result has been more than just presidential. It has come eerily close to the star system. Blair was not the means by which Labour gained power in 1997. Labour was the means by which Blair gained power. Only a fool could call Britain’s government this past eight years a Labour one. It has been a Blair one. This is what makes the Brown succession so unknown a quantity.

In Blackpool last week the Tories thrilled to the same lesson. They experienced a Damascene conversion to the new politics. They had long used “star quality” as a term of abuse. Hence their scrupulous choice of leaders with no taint of populism: John Major, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard. Each was selected to play Jeeves to the Conservatives’ Wooster. When the exception, Margaret Thatcher, knocked the party sideways the party establishment pretended that her appeal was purely ideological. It was not.

In his farewell speech on Thursday Howard remarked that Blackpool was “one of the most exhilarating conferences in years”. He did not say why. The reason was that the normally locked gates of the Tory convent had been thrown open and the inmates had been allowed a promiscuous fling with personalities. This was a denial of everything that Tory leaders had long held dear: that such excitement was beyond the delicate sensibilities of Conservatives.

The Tory hierarchy has been averse to all forms of expanded franchise, whether of elected mayors, devolved assemblies or, more recently, party leaders. It shuddered at the thought of Michael Heseltine or Michael Portillo at the helm. It still fights shy of Clarke. Like Bilbo Baggins the party has preferred to settle among the hobbits and dream of times past, rather than take the field against Labour’s orcs.

Tory members tasted the facts of political life in Blackpool and clearly loved it. They saw each candidate perform for their benefit. They sensed that their new leader cannot be just a chairman, a spokesman or even a salesman. He must embody and personify their party. He must be able to “make ’em laugh and make ’em cry” — and do it to others as well.

Davis’s failure to communicate with his audience on Wednesday indicated more than just a lack of speech-craft. It was a failure of substance as well as demeanour. All the speakers in last week’s beauty parade used clichés ad nauseam. In the hands of a practised orator they are background music, the familiar cadence that gains access to the listener’s ear. They soothe the path to an arresting and possibly unwelcome conclusion. Davis’s clichés on the other hand were ends in themselves. They went nowhere.

Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric presents the good speech as the tool of political persuasion. It does not address facts, for they should be beyond dispute. It addresses the audience by distracting its reason and arousing its emotion. The speaker must display intelligence, character and goodwill, all three. But he must never lose sight of his purpose, which is to persuade. He must become his own audience and judge himself as he is judged.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die