The Leader’s speech at a Party Conference is quite unlike the Conference speeches of other front-bench spokesmen. It has to cover a sufficiently wide number of subjects to avoid the criticism that one has ‘left out’ some burning issue. Yet each section of the speech has to have a thematic correspondence with all the other sections. Otherwise, you finish up with what I used to call a ‘Christmas tree’, on which pledges and achievements are hung and where each new topic is classically announced by the mind-numbing phrase ‘I now turn to…’. A powerful speech of the sort required to inspire the Party faithful, as well as easing the worries of the doubters, is in some ways more like a piece of poetry than prose. Not that one should be tempted to use flowery language, but rather that it is the ideas, sentiments and mood below the surface which count. Material which could easily form a clear and persuasive article may be altogether inappropriate for a speech. And although one has to scrutinize a text to ensure the removal of dangerous ambiguities, an effective speech may afterwards read almost lamely in cold print. I was to learn all these things over the next few years. But I had barely begun to grasp them when I started work on my first Leader’s Conference speech in 1975.
I told my speech-writers that I was not going to make just an economic speech. The economy had gone wrong because something else had gone wrong spiritually and philosophically. The economic crisis was a crisis of the spirit of the nation. But when I discussed the kind of draft I wanted with Chris Patten and others from the Research Department, I felt they were just not getting the message I wanted to despatch. So I sat down at home over the weekend and wrote out sixty pages of my large handwriting. I found no difficulty: it flowed and flowed. But was it a speech? I was reading it all through and redrafting on Sunday morning when Woodrow Wyatt — a former Labour MP turned entrepreneur, author, sympathizer and close friend — telephoned. I told him what I was doing and he suggested I come round to his house for supper so that he could look at it. The experienced journalist’s eye saw all that I had not. So the two of us began to cut and shape and reorganize. By the time I arrived in Blackpool I had the beginnings of a Conference speech. I also found that Chris Patten and others had written new material. We married the two and a first draft was accordingly produced.
It was Ted who had overturned the convention that the Party Leader only turned up at the end of the Conference, descending from on high to deliver his speech to an adoring, servile throng. I took this a stage further. As well as arriving early, I also, particularly on this first occasion, used every opportunity to meet the constituency representatives, whose loyalty I knew I would have to earn. In fact, I carried this to what the Conference organizers considered extreme lengths by spending my time talking to people down in the body of the hall when I was expected to be up on the platform.
In between receptions and visits to the debates I would go in to see how the speech-writers were proceeding. Adam Ridley helped with the economics. Angus Maude, who like Woodrow had the journalist’s knack of making material bright and interesting simply by reordering it, also came in from time to time. Richard Ryder was the keeper of the text. Gordon Reece’s expertise was in coaching me on how to deliver it, seeing for example that I did not cut short applause after a clap line by moving on too quickly — a perennial temptation for a speaker who is inexperienced or lacks confidence.
But by Wednesday it was clear to me that none of those working away in my suite was what in the jargon is known as a ‘wordsmith’. We had the structure, the ideas and even the foundations for some good jokes. But we needed someone with a feel for the words themselves who could make the whole text flow along. Gordon suggested that the playwright Ronnie Millar, who had drafted material in the past for Ted’s broadcasts, was the man to help. So the whole text was urgently sent to Ronnie to be (what I would always later describe as) ‘Ronnie-fled’. It came back transformed. More precisely, it came back a speech. Then there was more cutting and retyping throughout Thursday night. It was about 4.30 on Friday morning when the process was complete and I felt I could turn in for an hour or so’s sleep.
Earlier on Thursday evening, when I was reading through the latest draft, I had been called to the telephone to speak to Willie Whitelaw. Willie told me that Ted had arrived and was staying at the same hotel (the Imperial). His suite was a couple of floors below mine. For several months a number of Ted’s friends had been urging him to bury the hatchet. Willie, doubtless prompted by them, thought that this would be a perfect time for a reconciliation. He explained to me that pride was involved in these matters and Ted could not really come and see me. Would I therefore come and see him? I replied at once that of course I would. Willie said that that was ‘absolutely splendid’ and that he would ring me back to confirm. Meanwhile, I plunged back into the draft. About an hour and a half went by with no telephone call. Since it was now about 10 o’clock and there was still much to do on my speech, I thought that we must really get on with our ‘reconciliation’. So I rang Willie and asked what was happening. I was then told that Ted had had second thoughts. The hatchet would evidently remain unburied.
The Winter Gardens is a grand popular palace in the self-confident style of the mid-Victorians when Blackpool really blossomed into a seaside resort. It has cafés, restaurants, bars, a theatre and the Empress Ballroom where the main proceedings of the Tory Conference took place. ‘Ballroom’ scarcely does justice to the ornate and opulent splendour of the vast hall with its high ceilings, ample balcony, gilt, stucco and red plush. It has warmth and atmosphere that seem to welcome a speaker, and I always preferred it to the cold and clinical neatness of more modern conference facilities. The climax of the Conservative Conference creates a special electricity at Blackpool. For my part, though I had had almost no sleep, I was confident of my text and resolved to put everything into its delivery.
The speech had two main purposes. First, it was to contain a conclusive indictment not just of Labour policies or even the Labour Government, but rather of the whole socialist approach which was destructive of freedom. Secondly, I would use it to spell out a Conservative vision that did not merely employ phrases like ‘the free market’ and ‘personal independence’ for form’s sake, but took them seriously as the foundation of future policy. Reading it through almost twenty years later, there is nothing substantial that I would change — least of all the section about my personal creed and convictions.
Let me give you my vision: a man’s right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state as servant and not as master — these are the British inheritance… We must get private enterprise back on the road to recovery — not merely to give people more of their own money to spend as they choose, but to have more money to help the old and the sick and the handicapped… I believe that, just as each of us has an obligation to make the best of his talents, so governments have an obligation to create the framework within which we can do so… We can go on as we have been doing, we can continue down. Or we can stop and with a decisive act of will we can say ‘Enough’.
I was relieved when, as I got into my speech, I began to be interrupted by applause and cheers. Fun is often poked at the stage-management of Conservative Conferences. But one can distinguish, if one has a mind to do so, between support which is genuine and that which is contrived. This struck me as genuine. It was also quite unlike any reception I had ever had myself and, so the commentators said, quite unlike the Conferences of recent years. I had apparently struck a chord, not so much by the way I delivered the speech as by the self-confident Conservative sentiments it expressed. The representatives on the floor were hearing their own opinions expressed from the platform and they responded with great enthusiasm. I picked up some of their excitement in turn. On both the floor and the platform there was a sense that something new was happening.