I watched the Tory party conference on television this morning for as long as I could take it. Obviously I wouldn’t under normal circumstances – nobody sane would – but I’d been left in sole charge of a six-month old child (my son) and I wanted him to understand that life is very often pain. We made it through Dominic Raab’s bore-athon, but during Philip Hammond’s effort one of us filled his pants and so I turned it off. It seemed an appropriate protest.
Why were the speeches so bad? And, more to the point, why did the speakers seem such unbelievable dullards? There’s no excuse. This is their job.
The great cliché of speechmaking is that if you’re nervous you try to imagine the people in the crowd you are speaking to naked. That’s meant to help.
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