Phil Collins

Brown started well. There is no doubt the opening was effective. And it was still quite good when Gordon came on. The very first sentence defined the question - who I am and what do I think? By the end of the first paragraph we had the answer - fairness.

The axis of the speech was that neither markets nor states can be sovereign. Government has an important role in providing security and a fair deal. This is a proper argument. It is what Gordon Brown clearly thinks. It sounded authentic because it was. The passage on the 10p tax fiasco was also effective. He sounded contrite and the admission of weakness strengthened him.

This was evidence that Gordon Brown is a better speaker than people give him credit for. He went through a tonal range and the switches of mood were handled adeptly, apart from a camp moment near the end. The language was more colloquial than usual and the best line - "this is no time for a novice" - was a clever dismissal of his opponents, whichever party they are in.

The basic problem, though, even here, was the same as it ever was. Opponents were caricatured as laissez-faire dogmatists or command and controllers. These are positions that it is difficult to attach names to. And the trouble with Gordon Brown as the Third Way between Trotsky and Ayn Rand is that everyone is a third way between those two.

The section on the Tories was funny by accident but the actual jokes didn't so much fall flat as drop down dead. The poetic passages were written by William McGonagall's less talented younger brother on an off-day. The game of name the Cabinet bingo was a distraction. The peroration was too familiar.

The speech ended where it began, with his personal credo. But by then, was anyone listening?

Phil Collins is a former speech writer for Tony Blair

Chris Roycroft-Davis

The test of a speaker’s success is to ask: What’s the point they were trying to make? If Gordon Brown’s point was that he’s not a great communicator like Blair or Cameron, he succeeded. But if his aim was to show people he’s a warm, emotional man - he failed.

This speech was delivered with a machine-gun, spraying out words so fast that many welded themselves into monolithic slabs like something out of a German dictionary. “Newglobalage” and “risingsocialmobility” were particularly challenging, as was a new word: “varl-yews.”

Before he makes his next speech, someone has to tell the PM less is more. He had good messages but too many were swamped by rhetorical overload. It was like a Budget speech in which 200 facts are crammed into a 60-minute maelstrom.

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