The Leader's Speech

While I was catching up with the other reports from the UKIP Spring Party Conference, Lord Pearson's full speech has been published on the UKIP website in a burst of quite remarkable efficiency. It was broadcast in full on Sky News and in part on the BBC. And Iain Dale did not like it. To be quite accurate, he did not like the delivery and had no particular comment to make about the content. When asked about that, Iain gave it as his view that party leaders need to be able to vow the audience and if the audience is turned off then they are talking to themselves.

Well, maybe. But as one UKIP member said to me, they already have a speaker who vows the audience and, by and large, Lord Pearson is an easier brand to sell than Nigel Farage or UKIP. Come to think of it, he is an easier brand to sell than David Cameron because of his innate sense of honour that comes across despite all attempts on the part of the media to rubbish him. The weekly FT lunch interview, published in tomorrow's paper but on the net already is a very good example. One can warm to someone who believes so passionately in doing the right thing and actually going ahead with it (and I speak as someone who knows how exasperating his lordship can be).

Incidentally, Lord Pearson did not make much of immigration control, though he did point out a couple of times that it was an important issue, whcih cannot be dealt with unless we come out of the European Union, something that the main parties refuse to discuss.

Using UKIP's own slogan Straight Talking, he tackled the subject of standing against hard-line eurosceptics in other parties and came down on the side of those who think there should be political arrangements. UKIP, he explained, must be the one party that should not put party above country.

It was typical of Lord Pearson that he ended his speech with a quote from his friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

I end by reminding you of the words of my friend Alexander Solzhenitsyn said from the depths of his Soviet prison camp, “One word of truth outweighs the whole world”.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let us now put those words to the test.

Whether the party manages to live up to that remains to be seen.

And so, rather wearily, I end my report from the UKIP Party Conference and head off back to London where a sandwich does not have to be grated plastic cheese with some tasteless tomatoes in limp white bread at a price that implies something a bit better.