Leaked speech planned to be given at tory conference by David Cameron:
“You know, I watched Ed Miliband last week. He spoke for 65 minutes without notes, quite a feat. So I’ve been thinking about how to respond. Should I speak for 70 minutes, maybe in rhyming couplets?
But then I thought: ‘No’. I want to do something different. More importantly, I want to talk about a little man with a beard who lived more than 100 years ago. Keir Hardie wasn’t a natural Conservative. He never flogged a peasant or shot a striking miner. He didn’t own large parts of Wiltshire and he wasn’t descended from William IV. He was a common little man who didn’t know how to hold a fork or eat oysters. He didn’t know the English translation of Magna Carta and he couldn’t wear a top hat. In fact, he founded the Labour party; but if Keir were alive today, I’m telling you he’d be a branch secretary in one of our Cotswold constituencies. My family knew the Keir Hardies. Their mother used to come in once a week to clean our spittoons and we saw at first hand the wisdom and goodness that has informed so many of my own political views.
Friends, it is time to claim Keir Hardie and his message of fraternity for the Conservatives. You think I’m joking? Keir believed in free schools and so does our own Michael Gove. He believed in pensions and the right of women to vote – and this is something the Conservatives have also believed in for decades now.
In his early political career, Keir Hardie had to go into an electoral pact with the Liberals. But within a few years he’d completely obliterated them as a political force. Who says we can’t learn from him?
Keir Hardie believed in a society where everyone should have the chance to be as fortunate as the most successful – and so do we. We want to see the ladder of opportunity extend all the way down to the upper-middle class. In fact, we want to go further. I want a society where any pleb can aspire to benefit from cuts in the top rate of income tax.
But listen, it isn’t just Keir we can learn from. There is another man without whom the Conservative party wouldn’t be what it is today. Nye Bevan founded the National Health Service, but it took a Conservative government to make it the centrepiece of an Olympics opening ceremony. We need to make it our NHS, just as we made Marks and Spencer our M&S. We need to get out the message that the NHS is for everyone; you don’t have to be common to use it. I’ve used the NHS many times and it is nowhere near as bad as you think.
And there are all kinds of other thinkers you might not associate with our cause but who spoke to an ideal we should hold. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and their son Fabian. Their ideal? The co-operative movement. They believed we are all in this together. Does that sound familiar? They believed in a Big Society. I can imagine us adopting that kind of slogan. Of course, we’d want to flesh it out a bit, otherwise it’s just some fuzzy meaningless fluff you use for a good headline. But I tell you, they were on to something.
And Karl Marx; now I’m not saying we can take a lot from Das Kapital – but only last night I was reading The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. What worked in 1848 can work in 2028. And you know what Marx said about class: you’ve either got it or you haven’t.
I also want to tell you a bit about myself. I wasn’t born to rule. Well, OK, I was. But my family didn’t always enjoy the privileged existence we enjoy today. Once upon a time my family were refugees, fleeing from Oliver Cromwell’s purges. They settled in Scotland, like Keir Hardie’s forebears. Keir and I were cut from the same cloth, even if the material was used rather differently. His for some kind of cap and mine for some rather splendid tails. But scratch the surface and we had a shared socialist value that only the Conservatives can deliver.
Quite strange seems DC and Ed share a speech writer
