Leadership, leadership, leadership. You couldn’t miss it. Leadership wasn’t just the clearest theme of David Cameron’s speech to the Tory conference just now, but also one of its most common words. By my count, it popped up around 30 times. “I’m proud to lead this party,” he said in the very first paragraph. “It is leadership we need,” he continued. The aim, I’m sure, was to paint an even stronger contrast between David Cameron the Prime Minister and Ed Miliband the Sub-Prime Ministerial.
But Cameron wasn’t just talking about his own leadership. As he put it himself, “success will come: with the right ideas, the right approach, the right leadership. Leadership from government: to set out the direction we must take, and the choices we must make. But leadership also from you.” It was, in effect, a recasting of the argument for the Big Society.
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