CAMERON SHOWS HIS POWER OF SPEECH...WAS IT HIS FINEST HOUR?

He had come to the seaside at the end of a shaky summer. Now, like any performer on the big stage on the big night – the actor on his first night playing Hamlet at Stratford –  this was when he had to deliver.

“We needed Churchill, what we got was Iain Duncan Smith,” said the England footballer Gareth Southgate, describing Sven-Goran Eriksson at half-time in their losing 2002 World Cup match against Brazil. This week he might settle for a Cameron.

Labour, the party of Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot, of Barbara Castle and Tony Benn – stellar orators all – suddenly has nobody who can make a half-decent speech.

It is as if anything more dangerous than a monotone crawl through sheaves of turgid notes has been ruled out on grounds of health and safety. Even blustering John Prescott is no more and grinning Tony Blair, who certainly knew how to work an audience, has disappeared as suddenly and totally as the Cheshire Cat.

Dear reader, may you long be spared having to listen to a speech by David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary. “He bores for Britain” is a would-be-witty cliché. In Miliband’s case it’s part of the job description.

Winston Churchill in wartime made what were and remain the most powerful speeches of the British 20th century – the one about so many owing so much to so few, the one that ends “this was their finest hour”.

When it really mattered he was an incomparable hero, a peerless speech-maker and it was seemingly effortless. But for decades Churchill had bored the House of Commons, not to mention cabinets and government department meetings, with rambling, overlong orating, and his off-the-cuffness was prepared and rehearsed to the last gasp.

But when it came to the crisis this old man, in love with his own verbosity, delivered perfectly formed masterpieces of perfect length. He understood the power of words though he was aware that in 1940 rhetoric was no guarantee of British survival. If things had gone differently, words would have counted for nothing.

Cameron is not Churchill and some wobbly opinion polls and ornery Right-wing Tories are hardly the Battle of Britain.

Yesterday’s opinion polls show that, for a day or two at least, the public’s view of him has been considerably changed. George Osborne’s promise about inheritance tax is probably the key to the love surge but the Cameron speech certainly made a difference.

Those who sat through the whole Blackpool Toryfest heard good speeches from Osborne and Liam Fox and a very good one from William Hague. There was also Boris Johnson, if you like that kind of thing.

David Davis, who died here two years ago when he overreached himself by trying to become leader, was perfectly adequate as Shadow Home Secretary, the clunking fist of Tory law and order.

But Cameron, moving round the stage as if it was his sitting room, treating the audience as if they were friends, walked the talk and talked the walk.

Others were involved in writing the speech but the words felt like his own – sensible, modern, constructive, not contrived, or coldly calculated, not artificial and swotted-over like something read from notes.

Smarter than Brown, from his suit to his fingernails, he made it all seem very easy. We knew he could do it of course – in the contest for the Conservative leadership he had done the same thing in miniature. He was totally at ease, totally presentable and it transformed his fortunes.

Not entirely surprising really – educated at Eton and Oxford with PR as his finishing school, he is clever and smooth as glass (though very few Etonian-­Oxonian-PR men can do what he did on Wednesday).

He is an attractive politician though not yet a truly compelling one. I doubt if he has the seductive powers of a Blair or a Clinton but that may be all to the good. Millions were swept along by Clinton and Blair in a sort of love affair but woke up feeling they had been raped.

Politicians are rarely called upon to be orators nowadays; the age of the public meeting is long gone.

Party conference is probably the only time they do it – and party conferences are really just big family gatherings. There may be some unpleasantness but at family gatherings isn’t there always?

Watching Brown and Cameron conference addresses was like seeing a bad best man’s speech at a wedding and then a very good one. We have all suffered through bad best man’s speeches where a bloke, head down, reads word for word from a tedious typed document, lumbering through an endless inventory of anecdotes about the bridegroom that might have been funny when they happened (and if you were drunk) but are really not funny now.

Being called upon to make a speech in public is, even for many confident articulate people, a hellish torture. They are appalled by the thought and don’t know how to do it. After all, apart from teachers, lecturers and priests, who is practised at such skills? Who knows how to tailor a speech that hits the right note? A bad speech, especially a long bad one, can severely dent a happy party though, mercifully, drink usually takes the edge off it.

On the other hand, a terrific speech makes an occasion special, be it a wedding, funeral or party conference. That is why Cameron shone bright as the illuminations. That is why his people are so grateful to him. He lit them up.

The Tories desperately wanted to see him look good. They needed it. And he did look good. Talking without notes is a bravura thing to do, like the trapeze artist at the Tower Circus performing without a net.

Speaking like this is a good trick but it’s a trick. It takes the audience’s mind off what’s being said. But trapeze artists don’t fall very often and an accomplished speaker can do it without notes.

Now, as in 2005, Cameron looks better than he actually is, or at least than we know him to be. Ask people about his speech and you will find that manner is far more important than matter.

Almost no politician’s arguments and propositions bear close scrutiny – there are always sleights of hand. We still don’t know whether the soft new green Tory has gone hard round the edges in response to popular demand.

It took a bit of time for people to become rather underwhelmed by the cycling-to-work hug-a-hoody Cameron, It will take a little time now for people to ask the hard questions again.

We need to see what we believe when we really get down to cases – when we see the sums on the new tax arrangements, when we see what his fine words about family being the best welfare state really add up to and whether they make a difference.

The thing about being out of power is that it is a game of smoke and mirrors. You can look bad one week and look good the next, simply by putting on a good show.

This week Cameron looks good and Brown looks bad. The point is that Cameron is very good at looking good. Brown is an actor too, of course, a craggy character actor, Cameron is a matinee idol – at his best on stage. On Wednesday it was matinee time in Blackpool.

Believe what you see at conference at your peril. It is fantasy time – a fan club meeting. Nowhere else does Mr Cameron look so good.

He hasn’t done enough to persuade enough people that he is a serious proposition. The challenges are yet to come. Only people not using their brains fall for people just because they don’t use notes.

Everybody loves the way Cameron tells it but I would be more impressed if I could remember what he said.