PM’s speech: vacuous, repulsive, manipulative – and his best yet

David Cameron's conference speech was "vacuous", but "he fully deserved the rapturous reception that greeted him", says the Daily Mail's Peter Oborne. The prime minister "has earned his place in history" albeit "in the second division", rather than alongside the likes of "Thatcher, Churchill or Gladstone".

Although his foreign policy has been a "shambles", he has "presided over social reforms which will resonate in British history". He has also "brought about a far more telling transformation in the fortunes of the Tory Party even than Tony Blair did for Labour". However, he has "cut his own throat" with his pre-election announcement of his intention to leave before the end of his current term in office.

His speech was worse than vacuous it was "repulsively manipulative", says Simon Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. While Cameron "bragged about the work of our heroic armed forces around the world", he neglected to mention that "ourconventional forces are overstretched, underfunded and woefully inadequate". Of course, "when you lack an opposition, and are unlikely to have one for some time, you can posture [and] command endless fatuous standing ovations".

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But "before its next conference the threat to the West from Russia and the internal party debate over Europe will offer grave challenges to the Tory party". Cameron "shamefully ignored these realities last week, but cannot do so much longer".

Cameron's speech in fact "had more force and substance" than past examples, says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. If he can stick to his "One Nation" Conservatism, then come 2020 his legacy will be "to break the link between social housing and worklessness", to give individual schools and hospitals more freedom to excel, and to slash the size of the prison population. "For the first time... Cameron has a clear, credible and explicable personal agenda. All he has to do is follow it."