Liz Truss’s cliché-ridden speech was saved by Greenpeace

Liz Truss has, if nothing else, been working on her delivery. Her first speech to conference as Prime Minister was only about seventy per cent as stilted as usual. She occasionally, though just occasionally, sounded like she was speaking to the audience rather than reading something off an autocue. She remembered to smile. She even had a go at pointing matily into the crowd when she was saying nice things about her ‘dynamic new chancellor’ or her ‘fantastic deputy prime minister’. And – which was the most she could have hoped for – she got through it without dropping any sort of clanger.

The speech itself, perhaps deliberately, was a hopelessly dull effort: a compendium of exhausted buzz-phrases chunked into groups of three or strung together with laborious anaphora. Not a single anecdote had the pulse of felt experience (except, perhaps, her unexpectedly woke complaint about being given a ‘junior air hostess’ badge when her brothers got ‘junior pilot’ badges); not a single phrase had the zip and originality that would have given her speech some life.