'It took a while to realise how badly off Ed Davey's speech was'

QUENTIN LETTS: Like an ageing ham, it took a while to realise how badly off Ed Davey’s speech was

Even at the scrappiest conferences they normally pack in for the leader’s speech. Not for Sir Edward Davey.

When the Lib Dem leader came prancing sideways on to the stage with a forced grin, hands wide like some two-dimensional figure in a Ptolemaic hieroglyph, the hall was roughly half full. Banks of empty seats. Lord’s during a Middlesex county match.

In decades of coming to these shindigs I had not seen a worse attendance for the leader’s big finale. Initial thought was ‘that’s unusual’. By the end it was more a case of ‘good call by the activists’.

As with ageing supermarket ham, it took a while to realise how badly off this speech was. Sir Edward has never been a fizzer. Even so, the glacial speed of his delivery was unexpected.

Leaders’ speeches normally shoot off the launch pad. Sir Edward was stagnant from the start.

‘When the Lib Dem leader came prancing sideways on to the stage with a forced grin, hands wide like some two-dimensional figure in a Ptolemaic hieroglyph, the hall was roughly half full,’ writes Quentin Letts

My dear, late brother, who liked to drive fast cars, would become frustrated by slower motorists and shout ‘get off the road and milk it!’ as he accelerated past them. I thought of him yesterday. Thought of him a lot.

Sir Edward, a middle-lane dawdler, was not to be chivvied. He kept pursing his lips. There were Pinteresque pauses. The audience, such as it was, went from expectant smiles to expressions of stumped ennui.

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Their leader mentioned ‘interest rates soaring’ and raised a hand like a man pulling an old-fashioned lavatory chain. Five paces to the left, five to the right. He said we needed better relations with Europe and nodded thirty-two times to indicate his seriousness. Thirty-two nods! We had meaningful stares ahead.

Narrowing of the eyes. Glugs of drink from one of three water glasses.

Like the worst drinks-party bore, he kept rolling his tongue and smiling with relish as he contemplated the next sentence of gloop. A joke was delivered so heavily that had it been made of Bakelite it would have shattered. He ‘apologised’ for having called the Government ‘clowns’. ‘Yes, I apologise to the whole clown community,’ he confessed, about five minutes after the rest of us had clocked the gag.

‘I used the wrong C word. It should have been Conservatives.’ To my left a man slapped his brow, possibly to try to stay awake.

All this was no worse, and certainly less calamitous and/or mad, than past speeches by Theresa May and Liz Truss. But then Sir Edward got on to his mother and her death from cancer in the mid 1970s, and this was when things deteriorated.

This is not easy to say without causing hurt. When a politician speaks of having been orphaned by cancer and when he talks of his poor mother’s pain and how he, as a puzzled boy, tried to nurse her, it is obviously raw territory. Raw for him and raw for plenty of us who have lost family to cancer. In the last six years I lost two siblings to cancer. It’s a tricky subject.

Sir Ed Davey, leader of the Liberal Democrats, is congratulated by MP Helen Morgan as he leaves the stage after delivering his keynote speech during the Liberal Democrat conference at Bournemouth International Centre

Sir Edward appeared to become a little teary. Did he intend that? No one quite knew where to look. Then he proceeded, seamlessly, to claiming that cancer sufferers such as his mother had been ‘let down and forgotten about by this Conservative government’. After adding the sorry tale of a friend of his who has bad cancer, which he attributed in part to NHS failings, he said ‘none of this should be party political’.

That was the moment I realised the supermarket ham was not just off but was shimmering blue and green and making me feel ill. If you don’t want something to be party political, don’t manipulate it so emotively in a party leader’s conference speech.

The NHS care my brother received was far from optimal because the political class, en masse, forced our health system into Covid hysteria.

The Lib Dems as a whole are a generally well-intentioned, if illiberal, crowd. But with this speech I’m not sure I can stomach their leader.

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