Theresa May’s speech was a dud because Tories can’t do rhetoric

There are many ways to make a conference speech memorable and Theresa May managed most of them. A prankster with a P45, a constant cough and a set that fell to bits as she spoke, the speech was a riot of metaphors in waiting. It may yet be pointed to as a decisive moment in her premiership but it was certainly notable. The only forgettable aspect was the content. When Mrs May tries to inject passion into her voice it is not just the frog that catches in her throat. It is her conservatism.

Conservative politician can ascend to the rhetorical heights at time of peril. Winston Churchill, was, as David Cannadine once wrote, both a master and a slave of the English language. In his early years, Churchill had an unenviable reputation for lavish verbosity. In 1908, as the Colonial Under-Secretary, Churchill gave a speech on an African irrigation scheme in which he tried out a locution that would later become renowned: ‘Nowhere else in the world could so enormous a mass of water be held up by so little masonry’.