Prime Minister Cameron?

David Cameron has just given a remarkable speech to the Tory party conference in Blackpool. A week ago it looked as though the Tories were done and Project Cameron an embarrassing fiasco. Now, after a successful conference, Cameron may have wrong-footed Labour himself. In other words, these remain febrile times.

Cameron’s task was to demonstrate that he had the ability to rise above party, persuading his television audience (and the doubters in his own party) that he has it in him to be Prime Minister. My sense was that he succeeded and that he did so in part because of the bold, even fresh, approach he took. This was not your ordinary pre-election stem-winder. In fact it wasn’t much of a stem-winder at all (which in turn makes it harder to gauge its effectiveness).

The first bold step was to speak for 68 minutes without recourse to a prepared text or autocue.