He constantly brown-nosed the yawning audience of tailor made business suits and put on a pitiful display of frustrated urgency. He is no actor. He lacked confidence in his words and himself as he pretended he was just as ruddy sick as they were about all this blinking bureauracy.
He was so self-conscious of the impression he wanted to give (fast-moving, fast-talking) he looked more like a nervous new junior Minister out of his depth than an international statesman. His role was essentially to suck up to big business and to announce all the usual procedures to be followed when setting up new enterprises can go to hell, as long as new jobs are created.
He kept talking about finding a "spirit" (buccaneering, deal-making, hungry) when such a spirit, is a collective human creation which evolves spontaneously and cannot be expected to appear on demand. Even from such a powerful PM.
He also listed, with faux anger, the numerous barriers to progress which amounted to the minimum safeguards to prevent unfettered business from building roads through national parks and flattening communities to build even more supermarkets.
Dave derided consultations (asking the people affected), impact assessments (measuring what would happen to other businesses) and even audits (ensuring the money is spent correctly). "We don't need all this tick box stuff, " he fulminated. In other words, business interests should supercede the public interest.
He saved a special word for Judicial Reviews - that pesky process, administered by independent judges, which checks whether illegal decisions have been taken. It was Virgin's JR which revealed DoT's severe staff cuts had knobbled their ability to run a fair bidding process for West Coast Mainline.
"These are not how we became one of the most powerful, prosperous nations on earth." Well, no and I would suggest Victorian managerial style is not something we would all want to return to. In those good old days, corporate takeovers typically required sending platoons of troops on gunboats and availing ourselves of poorer nations' natural resources. That ship has sailed.
Cameron had already turned his urgency counter up to 11 but then went even higher by declaring Britain at war (economically) so it was completely justified to rip up the rule book just like we did when the Luftwaffe's planes were raging overhead.
All speechwriters should realise when they have to invoke Adolf Hitler then they have gone too far. PMs should also be more assured than raising panic when simply stronger leadership is required.
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