I’m on the top of Google’s results for John Major Ipswich. Above Sky. That won’t last for long, but while it does I thought I’d give a quick verdict on the speech.
Well it was OK, John Major is a professional politician (or was one) and giving a good speech is part of his forte. He had three themes, defence, how rubbish the economy was and civil liberties. Not Europe, where he would have bought the house down with anything even mildly sceptical, but considering that there were a whole clutch of Gummers there, perhaps its not so surprising. On defence he claimed we shouldn’t be in Iraq or Afghanistan, or at least not in the way we are currently and also accused Gordon Brown of being less than honest on the funding issue and using the forces as a political diversion. On the economy there was the big “you’re in more debt than you can imagine” which is quite a common refrain these days. As John Major did not say, the Spectator’s debt clock has every man, woman and child owing £31,146 – at the moment. That includes public sector middle managers who make up the ranks of Labour activists and councillors who have no prospect of ever contributing anything worthwhile to the economy. On civil liberties there was a generalised attack on New Labour rather than simply Gordon Brown and John Major even used the “libertarian” word. Of course John Major’s administration was nowhere near as contemptuous of civil liberties as New Labour is, but still… As they say heaven rejoices more at a sinner who repents, so I suppose we all should be glad at this concern for civil liberties which perhaps was not as obvious during his time in office.
In short a statesmanlike and polished performance, but with the exception of allusions to knowing Ben Gummer when he was a baby, not one that I would be surprised to hear in Walsall, Norwich North or any other Conservative-Labour marginal. I was genuinely surprised when I found out later that the criticism about Brown was new to the speech.
Ben Gummer’s speech was a lot better, and did the required bit of guilt tripping of the hundreds of people who had come in from safe Conservative seats in other parts of Suffolk. It was also locally based, going on about various episodes from Ipswich’s electoral history, and actually quite funny. We also had Peter Burgoyne doing the auction (it looks bloody difficult) and Paul West doing some introductions – and I’ve never seen Paul look so awed, he’s usually a very fluent speaker. Michael Irvine was the last speaker, the MP for Ipswich from 1987 to 1992. He was unintentionally funny with impassioned calls for “days of hard pounding behind Ben”, without making it clear what Ben thought about this, but sadly his speech was very short and he wouldn’t let us know any more.
Was it worth the £60 per head? Well the money’s going on fighting one of most marginal seats in the country and it was very well organised by Kathy Kenna and Penny Gummer.
