Labour Party Conference 2014: Ed Miliband's speech is high concept, low impact

Ed Miliband takes the stage at Labour conference, pointing to (possibly imaginary) friends in the audience, waving to the back of the crowd. The hall is packed. Earlier, the queue snaked all the way out the door, across the vast conference foyer, out of the main doors and halfway around the huge Manchester conference centre building. Behind Miliband on a screen is a mosaic of party members' photos: "We are Labour." He doesn't look nervous, exactly, more as if he's straining to look relaxed.

That's no surprise: Ed Miliband is under pressure. Extreme pressure. Bottom of a deep-sea trench, teeth of a car crusher 500-tonnes of concentrated pressure. He faces two challenges with this speech. First, he needs to sell Labour to a still sceptical public. At the moment, Ed still doesn't feel like a leader to most people when they squint their eyes: according to YouGov, 34 per cent of people think Labour will win the next election but only 25 per cent think Miliband will end up as Prime Minister.

The second challenge is more technical, but none the less pressing. Following the Scottish referendum last week, Labour have resisted David Cameron's plans to find an answer to the so-called West Lothian question—the issue of whether Scottish MPs should be allowed to vote on English Legislation—before the next general election. The public want answers on this—the same YouGov poll states that 71 per cent of them think Scottish MPs should be excluded from these votes following further devolution. MPs including vocal backbencher Simon Danczuk and former Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw do too. "This isn't a fringe issue," Danczuk tells me. He's right—from aged activists to young upstarts everyone that I speak to thinks it is crucial.

So the stakes are high, something that clearly isn't lost on party grandees, who are wary of giving precious words lest they be picked up by the papers. One former New Labour Secretary of State tells me he's put himself under a vow of silence. John Prescott, striding through the conference hall, puts his refusal more forcefully: "Prospect!" he cries "all you thinkers. I'm a doer not a thinker." The silence of rent-a-quotes, the lack of serious policy announcements in the morning and the leaking of some sections of the speech to the press combine to ensure all eyes are on the leader.

And how does he look under their gaze, at the moment of truth? In short, not great. Ed's speech writers should have heeded the sage words of Mr Prescott—this is high-concept public speaking which doesn't quite come off. The early stages of the speech are all about building up to Ed's new big idea. First, we are fed the problem before we get anywhere near the solution. Post-referendum and post-coalition, says Ed, people have "lost faith in the future." We get this buzzphrase a few times. Why? Because they've been told "you're on your own" (buzzphrase two). Tapping in to popular dissatisfaction with elites and politicians, Ed says that the nation feels "the deck is stacked, the game is rigged." All of this builds up to his new big idea, the solution to it all: "Together."

It's a neat, modern reimagining of the Old Labour concept of solidarity. But during the speech, after such a build-up, the single vague word falls flat, which is a shame as he says it 51 times. The speech follows this pattern of anti climax for some of its key policy announcements. By the time Ed gets to saying he will raise the minimum wage by £1.50 an hour by 2020 for example, the figures feel a little paltry compared to the towering ideological framework in which it has been placed. Other policy ideas are strong: 36,000 new staff for the NHS hits one of the electorate's most vital issues where it hurts the Tories. The vote for 16-17 year olds feels like an idea whose time has come after the referendum. But throughout you can't help but feel that Miliband's old problem is still there: these are individual fragments, but they don't add up to a coherent whole.

So how will it go down? The internet, as it is wont to do, wilfully missed the point, choosing to fixate not on Ed's vision for a better Britain but on the number of normal people he name checked during the speech: Elizabeth, the apprentice he made stand up on stage, Josephine who worked as a cleaner, and who could forget Gareth, the software developer Ed met at a picnic on Hampstead Heath. Gareth, who is not a Labour voter, voiced his concerns to the Labour leader about being priced out of the London housing market. Buzzfeed managed to track him down, and for a while he was trending above Syria on Twitter.

The left of the party should feel happy with the hard policy that was in there. When I speak to Danzcuk after the speech he tells me that the pledge to get as many school leavers into apprenticeships as university will go down well with blue collar supporters, as will the promises on the NHS and his commitment to build "as many homes as we need" by 2025. But he'd have liked more discussion of the English Question and is "puzzled" as to why Miliband would bash Murdoch and the Daily Mail so soon before an election. In all, it is likely to impress the "left wing Guardian readers" but a little more must be done to reach out to the working classes.

Miliband has laid out "Labour's plan for Britain" and it isn't disastrous, but he could have done more. Before the speech, 62-year-old Labour activist Kevin Wilson told me he'd been explaining politics to his granddaughter the other day, telling her that "Labour look after the poor, and the Conservatives look after the rich." She told him, he said, that "I think we should look after the poor, because the rich can look after themselves." that, he said, is the sort of powerful, simple language he wanted to hear from Miliband. He may have been disappointed.