It seems the press commentators enjoyed the speech, with all the major papers being pretty positive about the speech, a lot more than the vox pops appear to show.

I think given the goings-on in Washington, Cameron did very well to get so much coverage.

I saw the speech as a starting point to getting out more policy - he showed us the areas he will be looking to change. And we do know more about what Cameron will do now than ever before. Maybe I am just more patient - too patient - on the policy front. I do not see why he needs to hand out detailed policy 18 months before an election. I am more interested in what he does put out makes sense and is good.

Unfortunately, the most eye catching policy for me was the transport stuff, which is utter nonsense!

As for whether he actually will implement them consistently we can not know until/if he becomes PM. A leap of faith will be needed to change to the Tories and I still do not think we are there - but yesterday was a significant step forward I think IF this is built on.

The trouble with lack of concrete policies is that you can’t tell what the direction looks like: Cameron overloaded on his values, but we didn’t really see where that would take us, or whether he actually implemented them consistently.

He did score some clunking hits: but mainly on Miliband and Johnson. You’d almost think he wants to keep Brown as Labour leader!

david-keen’s last blog post..‘People Want to Know What Values You Bring’: Grave Dave Cameron’s Vision and Values

As for policy, I always think this is a bit of an unfar charge on Cameron. Yes his party is a bit policy light, but they do have policy and, we hope, they will have more by election time. It would have been nice to hear one or two more policy annoucements in the speech, but I think he did cover a number of policy areas and set out a direction in each of these at the very least.

I think setting the direction is what you want from these leadership speeches at conference rather than a full on policy manifesto. Did Brown’s speech have any morepolicy in it? Did Blair cover policy in detail in his conference speeches? Obama has the same charge made against him. The speech really would have been boring had he just read out a series of white papers.

In short - he gave the party a clear direction that he hasn’t done up to now and the next stage on the march to being elected is fattening out this direction with more policy. He also demonstrated that he knows what the electorate are thinking about very well indeed. I think he has set it up very nicely.

I’ll relisten when I update the videos later.

The phrase all over the news is “Man with a Plan”, which is too close to “Man with a Van” for me.

Matt