Oh that was painful. Agony. It was squirmingly, screamingly, startlingly bad. It was dull. It was plodding. It was morose. “When he speaks to you it's like a mental block; I just zone out,” said a woman on Newsnight's floating-voter panel the night before. “Cheer up!” the panel unanimously urged the Prime Minister.
Cheer up? I nearly hanged myself from my hotel trouser press. In place of levity we had seriousness, hard work and a moral purpose. And New Rules.
There were some nice lines, but mostly it was a list, not a speech: thud after thud of meaningless proclamations - we will be the party of law and order, we will be the party of the family, this will be the British century.
It's not just the content; it's also the delivery. Mr Brown has no feel for pitch or intonation. He therefore fails to send the appropriate signals to the audience, for example that he is in the middle of a paragraph. He is then interrupted by applause, which throws him of balance after the first few words of the following sentence. He then has to start that sentence again, lending the speech a staccato-like lack of quality.
What he said:
"And where I've made mistakes I'll put my hand up and try to put them right. So what happened with 10p stung me because it really hurt that suddenly people felt I wasn't on the side of people on middle and modest incomes - because on the side of hard-working families is the only place I've ever wanted to be."
What he meant:
I admit that I should not have included that piece of egregious chicanery on the 10p rate at the end of my budget speech last year. I was trying to secure a cheap headline in the next day's press. And I now know I should have thought the whole thing through more carefully at the beginning. As for failing to put my hand up and to put it right, well I was in denial, you see. Still am, probably.
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