Matthew Taylor used to work for Tony Blair in Downing Street as his chief strategy adviser. Now running the Royal Society for the Encouragment of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), he's always been pretty loyal to his old boss. But on his blog today he's made an interesting confession:
You see, I have an admission to make. Even when I worked for him, I was alone among his fans in never really liking Tony Blair's speeches.
It wasn't just that I hardly ever got any lines in to them (OK, it was mainly that). For me an important aim of a speech is to close the distance between political leaders and the rest of us.
I yearned for argument and connection instead of simply declaiming. Sometimes TB did this, particularly when he was trying to persuade his party of something with which it felt uncomfortable, but generally his speeches were cleverly stitched together lists of quotable assertions.
He made his comments in a post about Gordon Brown's speech yesterday. Taylor is one of the shrewdest commentators around and the full article is worth a read.
