Lessons for the Prime Minister’s speech-writer

To a new Prime Minister’s speech-writer the party conference approaches like a bullet train. If my friend, Sir Ronald Millar, were still alive he would be working flat out on Theresa May’s speech by now. With the date of delivery advancing and the drafts on her desk ever more undeliverable, the need for ‘Ronnification’ must be overwhelming. It always was. Ronnie is best known today as the playwright who wrote ‘U-turn if you want to: the lady’s not for turning’ for Margaret Thatcher in 1980, and gave this paper’s former editor, Charles Moore the title for the second volume of his great biography. But Ronnie, a classicist as well as a man of the West End and Hollywood, was proudest of what he called his ‘De Clementia’ moments, the softening of harsh edges, the promises to the doubters and the desperate that Mrs Thatcher made on entering Downing Street for the first time.