Brown comeback speech as-it-happened
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This event is now over, but you can see how it happened below.
The prime minister begins his speech by telling a story about young people with problems coming to his office. My word, he’s animated. He’s actually moving his feet, walking in small steps around the stage and gesticulating in a controlled way as he talks.
Children who would have been excluded by the Tories are given hope under Labour, he says, asking the audience to think of these young kids when they think about Labour. It’s like a UNICEF advert. “Some people say this is a broken society,” he says in a thinly veiled barb at David Cameron before launching into one of his laundry lists of the government’s achievements. “There is nothing bad about Britain that cannot be corrected by what’s good about Britain and what’s good about the British people.”
He’s now talking about Margaret Curran, the failed Glasgow East candidate, but it’s really the style of the speech that’s the story here. Frankly, I’m not sure we’ve ever seen the prime minister like this before, not even during his speech at the party conference. I’m not saying he’s pulling it off – the Blair/Cameron style, that is – but he’s visibly giving it a shot.
It might seem vacuous to concentrate on his body language, but it’s what the PM himself has done so we should play his game. The arm gestures are repetitive and unrelated to the content of the words he is speaking. This is a problem he’s had before, and it persists in making him look disconnected from his own words. The pacing around the stage bit works well, it instantly makes him look more dynamic. Most interestingly – I can’t see any notes. Is this supposed to be Mr Brown’s David Cameron moment, where the Tory leader called the PM’s bluff by doing an exceptional speech at last year’s Conservative party conference? Somehow I don’t imagine so, and Brown’s problems are deeper than image, but this is a marked improvement from previous appearances.
He’s onto reducing the world’s dependency on oil – a theme he says combines environmental agendas with economic ones. Despite addressing these international issues he’s used the word Britain and British at least five times now. It is his favourite theme after all.
Meanwhile, Alex Salmond and his winning candidate, John Mason, are jubilantly conducting a press conference in Glasgow. Both are beaming with the entirety of their face. Gordon Brown’s speech is descending into repetition and tedium, despite any improvements to his media appearance. These speeches have to be carefully balanced, the last thing he needs is a slow-hand clap from his audience and that’s exactly what the unions will do if he starts going on about how tough he’s going to be on them. Instead he has to navigate a cautious path – selling government policies as left-wing while never actually saying anything of the sort.
The speech comes to a close without too much fanfare. The serious business of keeping the unions on-side while not avoiding nasty right-wing press headlines now begins.
