QUENTIN LETTS: Labour Cabinet’s priggish, superior Left-wing voices

When political ­conferences finish it is sometimes said the cheers and applause resound through the ether long after the last delegate has left the hall. After this week’s Labour Party conference in Liverpool, all that echoes through my sore bean is a low, depressing drone.

Is it a punctured bagpipe, a pregnant ewe, some Merseyside fog horn or an air-block in the conference-season hotel plumbing? No, it is the Left-wing voice.

‘Fourteen years of Tory misrule… ­£22 ­billion black hole… politics of service… my father was a toolmaker.’ Insistent, gloomy, it makes everything sound worse than it is. Nagging. Puts you just on edge. If you have ever heard the mew of buzzards circling overhead, you will know the sensation.

You shake your skull, as if to dissuade a mosquito, yet the irksome whine persists. You hold your nose and blow, as after a trip in a pressurised aeroplane. No good. There remains this terrible background thrum, like that of a malfunctioning fridge.

It is moany, pessimistic, adenoidal. ­Sometimes it drips with superiority. At other points it curdles with something more like nastiness. Please make it stop!

Some on the Right allege that there is such a thing as the Left-wing face. I have never bought the theory, for unless we are Anne Robinson there is little we can do about our physiognomy. A few are born beautiful, the rest less so. But there is a Left-wing voice and it was on parade in Liverpool, male and female, young and old. Complaining.

Think of the voice that says ‘See It, Say It, Sorted’ on trains. Think of the comedian Jo Brand. Think of almost any Anglican bishop or TV weather ­forecaster. In council ­planning departments, at NHS surgeries, at ­pharmacy counters, in primary schools, at old people’s homes: the Left-wing Establishment voice, telling us off, treating us like fools, sucking all the vim out of the atmosphere.

Voices are self-made. They reflect mood and manner and, thereby, ­political leaning. They can jabber or plod, which may tell the listener something about the speaker’s inner-­propulsion. An optimist sounds quite ­different from a ­pessimist. Think Tigger v Eeyore in Winnie-the-Pooh. Much as I love donkey Eeyore, I have never had him down as one of life’s can-do brigade. As for Piglet? Lib Dem, obviously.

Voices can become ginny and ­tobacco-stained (Reform/Tory) or reedy and dry (Islington Lefty). They betray their owners’ approach to diet and self-discipline. Did you hear the glorious speech at the Reform party conference by 66-year-old ­businessman and MP Rupert Lowe? It was like listening to the gooey cheese board of an old-fashioned ­railway hotel. Compare it to the clipped, taut, priggish tones of our new, class-war-waging Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson. She, like Mr Lowe, has quite a deep voice but its character is quite different. She sounds constantly furious and ­prohibitive – a ­symphony of disapproval. It is another of those Left-wing voices, just short of brittle.

When it comes to larynxes, our new government is not exactly blessed. Sir Keir Starmer leads by example. The Prime Minister has plenty of things going for him. He has a tidy legal brain, a beautiful wife and, as we know, a superbly stocked wardrobe. But he also has a grindingly Left-wing voice.

Its most obvious defect is the nasality. He speaks like a frogman who has forgotten to remove his snorkel.

Some years ago, there was a commercial for Carling Black Label lager in which the pilots of an old RAF bomber were heard in radio communication. When the co-pilot removed his cockpit mask he still spoke in that squawky manner. It could have been Wing Commander Starmer.

For me, the worse thing about Sir Keir’s delivery is the ceaselessness of tone and ­undulation. His cadences lack variety. He may think this lends him a reliable, soothing air but to me it just sounds uninteresting. His speeches become the ­burblings of a dullard.

One expects a prime minister to be more ­gripping. In Starmer’s ­conference speech he spoke of ‘joy’ but made it sound miserable.

For Home Secretary at present we are blessed with little Ms ­Vinegar, Yvette Cooper. Aiee! Here is a voice as tight, acidic, sharp as a cider-apple, a voice that is, at least in public, ­unrelentingly antagonistic.

In ­private she may well be an expansive, life-affirming presence – no one who married Ed Balls can be without a sense of humour – but once she speaks publicly that is lost. It’s jagged, intolerant, ­patronisingly pitying in tone. It becomes the voice of someone determined to maximise problems and to bite into our freedoms.

Or how about Jess Phillips, ­minister for safeguarding? I ­normally love Brummie accents. My beloved father-in-law was from Alum Rock, one of ­Birmingham’s dustiest inner-suburbs. Ms ­Phillips, alas, is a caricature of the Brummagem bellyacher. That sits with her politics. No day is sunny enough she cannot introduce some drizzle.

It was not always this way. The Left used to have the best orators: Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, ­Barbara Castle. They were more gripping than ­Margaret Thatcher or Ted Heath. Michael Heseltine had panache, but that was in part down to his blond hairdo.

The Left used to have emotional force – something to fight for – and rhetorical variety. As a ­youngster, I found myself bewitched.

Let it be stressed this is nothing to do with class. The Right is arguably now more working class than the Left, if we still measure such things. Left-wing voices are defined more by their ­predictability and by a suggestion they’ve just been to an anger-­management course.

Where was the emotional force in Rachel Reeves’s Dalek-like delivery on Monday? It’s as if they regard audience involvement as something disreputable. All Ms Reeves offered with her ­tunnel-echoey voice was the monotonous honk of big-state stridency.

Voices from the floor of the Labour conference were just as bad, union blokes moaning about this or that in tones laden with the message ‘life’s not fair’. Well, no, life isn’t fair. Never has been and never will be.

Nigel Farage’s voice is as thick with nicotine as the Anaglypta of a ­Seventies pub; that helps him ­project an idea of liberated bloody-mindedness.

Sir Geoffrey Cox, Tory MP and former attorney-general, has an extraordinary booming voice that sounds to have been basted in ­gallons of goose fat and rum sauce. It makes you smile – and listen.

We heard no voices like Farage’s or Cox’s in Liverpool. Instead, Dame Angela Eagle, immigration minister, took a pop at Donald Trump in a voice that could be Alan Bennett’s sister: the squeak of an unoiled wheelbarrow. If they broadcast her voice from the cliffs of Dover, people-smugglers’ boats would do a rapid U-turn and race back to Calais at top knots.

The Left-wing voice is fashion-conscious, adopting Californian-style uplift or an affected, millennial world-weariness. It regards consonants as optional. Tony Blair and the people he gathered about him in the mid-90s affected the glottal-stop because they wanted to be thought of as egalitarian.

Ed Miliband is still at it; but at least mad Mil’ puts some whoomph into his speeches. The only other two Cabinet ministers who do so are Angela Rayner and Wes ­Streeting. Deputy Prime Minister Rayner may come across as ­aggressive, but she’s at least more interesting than snorkeler Starmer.

That noise reverberating in my head from the conference centre reflects a complacent belief that dullness is adequate, that vocal distinction is somehow improper because it is too individual.

How wrong they are. Making your voice interesting is how you ­communicate. It is how you grab the attention of the demos. But that takes flair, and the Left-wing voice – and mind – has no time for such vulgarities.