James Cleverly began his speech by asking: “What’s our job? Why are we here?”
He followed this with a Pinteresque pause, during which one reflected that these are profound questions.
Having dared to pause, he dared to be emotional, telling us how he and his family felt when his wife was found to be suffering from breast cancer: “It rocked our lives. I could hardly speak. Our boys were distraught.”
He then offered us the sort of anecdote with which Englishmen seek to show that they are not too full of themselves. As an officer in the Territorial Army, in command of a hundred men at Bristol, he found himself mobilised: “I thought I was going to Basra or Baghdad and I was sent to Luton.”
This is the sort of joke Ronald Reagan used to tell, and soon Cleverly was telling us that “my political hero was Ronald Reagan and he knew what optimism was.”
He went on: “Let’s be more like Reagan!… Let’s be more normal!… Let’s sell the benefits of Conservatism with a smile!”
What an ambition, to be normal, but it is one of the paradoxes of democracy that we expect our leaders to be both ordinary and extraordinary.
Cleverly went on a bit too long, but his command of tone was surer than his rivals’, he understood better than they did the craving for laughter, theatricality and jokes which even the most serious audience feels, and his speech received much the warmest applause.
Not that the other three speeches were bad. Tom Tugendhat, who went first, gave a slightly earnest lecture on leadership. Robert Jenrick was earnest too, and included the imprudent statement, “I loathe empty rhetoric.” Neither sounded ready to be leader.
Kemi Badenoch, who came on last, aimed high: “It is time to tell the truth.”
But she also offered the wisdom of her father, a general practitioner in Nigeria: “Never run for fun because you’ll get bad knees.”
She gave us a glimpse of night fears when she was growing up in Nigeria, making sure every door and window was secure, and hearing the screams of neighbours who were being robbed and beaten: “When you’ve experienced that kind of fear you’re not worried about being attacked on Twitter.”
Badenoch recalled her successful battle to prevent the holding of a convicted sex offender in a women’s prison in Scotland: “Nicola Sturgeon has gone and Labour now accepts our arguments.” That produced warm applause.
She went on to call for something “not attempted since Keith Joseph in the 1970s”, the chance taken while in opposition to “consider every aspect of what the state does and why it does it”.
Here was a more radical prospectus than any of her rivals was offering. Her applause was solid, but did not sound like a ringing endorsement of such an audacious project. With pleasing modesty, she did not attempt to prolong the applause, but departed into the wings.
The four candidates were then ushered back on to the stage, and waved at us like a relay team at the end of an exhausting race.
Richard Fuller, the Party Chairman, had some difficulty getting them off again, but once they were embedded in the audience, we sang God Save the King, at once the most traditional and most emotional moment on a not uninformative morning in Birmingham.
