THE WORLD, cried the Prime Minister in Brighton last week, is “fast-forwarding towards the future at an unprecedented rate!” If so, then there are some surprising pockets of resistance.

Take what you might loosely call the social structure of Britain. In the first half of the 20th century the changes were revolutionary. That has slowed. Today’s children have far more in common with their elders’ outlook than we postwar youths did with our prewar parents and grandparents in the Sixties. Or take science and technology. There have been no important inventions in the half-century since 1955, apart from the development of information technology. Society and culture in the half-century before were transformed by the arrival of electricity, telephones, television, aeroplanes and motor cars. I am still driving my 1953 Morris Minor and the Douglas DC3 (Dakota) plane is still in commercial service.

Or take cultural change. Despite much that shocks before being forgotten, the pace of deep change — the music, literature, sculpture and painting that is taken to a culture’s heart and endures — has slowed. The culture of 1955 is wholly accessible to us. To the people of 1905 a preview of 1955 would have come as a tremendous shock. Had 1955 been shown a preview of the way we live now, the surprise would be the continuity. What? No interplanetary travel, no dining on nutritional pills, no disposable paper underwear or unisex tinfoil robes? Here we are, still in our boxer shorts or frilly knickers, commuting to the office in jeans, slacks, skirts, suits and ties. The only serious difference is the disappearance of hats.

Or take agriculture, trade and industry. There has probably been no half-century since the Middle Ages in which the methods and patterns of farming in Britain changed less than they have since the end of the Second World War. In industry the underlying pace of the increases in productivity delivered by automation has been steadily slackening. As for “globalisation” (that foggiest of concepts): if you take this to be the proportion of total trade that is cross-border, there has been little change in a hundred years.

The same is true of medicine. At the beginning of the 20th century, average life expectancy in Britain was about 40. By 1950 it was about 70. The last half century has added three years.

As for what you might call the march of history, the sharpest change has been not forward but back: retreating from socialist and “mixed” economies, world government, world peace and the United Nations, and towards something not unlike the liberal-imperialism and gunboat diplomacy of the 19th century. Heavens — we’re even returning to nuclear power stations.

But to this columnist and former parliamentary sketchwriter, no example of the persistence of the old into a new age has been more remarkable than the persistence, as a primary — the primary — political skill, of public oratory.

Public oratory was prized by the ancients, praised by the Elizabethans, lauded by the Enlightenment, and cherished and taught in textbooks by the Victorians. But these were ages when platform oratory was almost the only way a politician could engage with his times. Today we can exchange thoughts and feelings at the touch of key.

So you might have thought that a chap’s skills on the soapbox would count for less. Real performance would be relegated, virtual performance promoted: how good is your website? How slick your video? How glossy your manifesto? How effective your rebuttal unit? Politics, you might have thought, was heading towards an age in which a politician relied mainly on a professional team to assemble, polish and market his message. The solo, virtuoso performance in real time would diminish in importance.

Yet I have just returned from three party conferences in which real performance on a real stage in a real auditorium before a real audience in a real seaside resort was by common consent elevated to being the principal test of a 21st-century political leader.

In the third of those three conferences, the Conservative Party and the news media, in concert, decided that a single performance amid the mildewed and peeling former glories of the Blackpool Winter Gardens must be the acid 21st-century test of a leadership candidate’s virtue.

We wanted candidates to learn their speeches by heart if they could. We forced them to perform in front of us, to make jokes, to move, amuse and engage us. Then we counted how long we clapped them for.

Five men went into that strange, ancient contest with their relative strengths more or less agreed by the bookmakers — and came out of it with the odds in every case radically reassessed. And all on the basis of public oratory. What a delightfully odd way to choose a leader.

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us