Amid plunging ratings, his speech sought to remind voters what Labour is for, showing integrity in its focus on inequality and insecurity
If you want to hear a politician lift their oratory, push their back against the wall. It took a mix of cabinet rebellion and economic slump to provoke Margaret Thatchers Ladys not for turning moment. Tony Blair could always find a winning phrase, but he never took the dark arts of rhetoric to greater heights than in the fraught Commons debate on Iraq, and even Gordon Brown finally found a ringing voice at Citizens UK in 2010, in a desperate last stand to save his government.
So it has proved with Ed Miliband. In Manchester just a few weeks before, he gave the flat conference speech of a man who could still calculate that he was likely to edge it over the electoral line, and he paid the price.
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