A competent address to the Tory conference shows he has substance, but tells us little we didn't already know
It was a competent leader's speech, one that reminded his listeners that David Cameron has more substance to him than the effervescent Boris Johnson, but also a flat speech for pretty flat times. This summer's Olympics and Paralympics are a warm glow in the national consciousness, but winter is drawing in and the economic spring seems as far away as ever.
Actually, Cameron went one worse than that, as his friend and ally George Osborne did on Monday. If the old "sclerotic" economies of the west, the world's dominant powers for 500 years, don't get their act together to match the resurgent power of Asia – and Latin America, Africa even – we are all in trouble. He wants Britain to be buccaneering again, "an aspiration nation" not trapped in a "yes, but" mentality which ducks tough challenges.
Splendid, splendid, as the ghost of Willie Whitelaw might have replied. We can all sign on for that, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg (did he even mention him once? I think not) as well as the Tory activists in Birmingham's Symphony Hall. How to do it, how to cut debt and deficit while nurturing investment and protecting the deserving poor, that's the hard bit.
We learned little that we didn't know already in policy terms. What struck me was that the tone Cameron struck was centrist, moderate, emollient even. He prodded the separatist SNP's Alex Salmond with a sharp stick, reminded the faithful that he had vetoed an EU treaty (not that it made any difference) and warned benefit scroungers that he is on their case.
But it wasn't a rant and hardliners must have known he was pulling his punches. Cameron mocked Labour for wanting to solve problems of overspending and excess borrowing (not all of it is the bankers' fault, only most of it) by doing more of the same. But he knows his strategy is vulnerable too. So much demand is being sucked out of the economy that borrowing is rising again.
And he praised "our NHS" and said he would defend it – though Jeremy Hunt is yet to look like a convincing champion. He expressed extravagant, feel-good admiration for entrepreneurs, plucky athletes and inventors – Britain is the best, it really is, he told them. For a moment some must have believed him.
"My job – our job – is to make sure that in this 21st century, as in the centuries that came before, our country is on the rise. And we know here how that is done. It is the collective result of individual effort and aspiration, the ideas you have, the businesses you start, the hours you put in," he said.
That was the core of the "aspiration" which explicitly claimed that Tories are usually better at this one nation stuff than Labour. "We don't preach about one nation but practise class war, we just get behind people who want to get on in life." No retreat on the austerity package, there's no other way if we don't want to head down the Greek road to unsupportable borrowing costs, the prime minister insists in the face of the latest IMF downgrade of future UK growth prospects.
OK, if you say so. Some tweeters immediately saw such talk as predatory free enterprise capitalism dressed up in the language of individual aspiration and choice. As cuts bite hardest on the deserving as well as undeserving poor – can they really cut benefit to larger families? – it will feel that way to many people. Cameron sees it as raising the aspiration bar for kids who have been sold short by low expectations but could become part of the dynamic element of society, the part that pays more in taxes – as a clutch of partisan studies have claimed this week – than they take out in benefits.
It was a speech that didn't address the wider problems facing the world community. Internationalism is on the retreat as foreign intervention becomes unpopular (he did defend the aid budget) and nations nurse their domestic economic problems. That is a weakness increasingly common to all party conferences; even Europe seems too daunting and divisive an agenda for the coalition government.
But it kept him in the game. Just as Ed Miliband strengthened his grip on his party in Manchester last week, so Cameron quelled silly talk of coups and Boris. It won't be a speech for the history books, but it will do for now.
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