I very rarely get nervous before speaking in public, but confess to feeling a

little more anxious than usual this morning, ahead of a speech to

the Independent Schools' Bursars Association. Three hundred bursars and
finance directors, whose lives and livelihoods, and the education of many
thousands of children, might be affected by Labour plans to change their
tax regime, plans which I intended to defend whole-heartedly, alongside
saying I felt attitudes to private education were a big part of what was
wrong with our country. I am not a fan!
It was less that I feared booing, hissing or heckling, more that my ego is
large enough for me to dread delivering a speech that is greeted with
indifference or sullen hostility. So, again rarely for me, as someone who
prefers to turn up, read the audience and riff, I prepared a "proper speech,"
and save for the occasional wandering ad lib, and a few cuts for time,
delivered it word for word as written in rAs things turned out, I was greeted
warmly, heard respectfully, and applauded sufficiently at the end to assure
me I would at least get out alive. Indeed, there were a fair few nods and
smiles to my central points and I saw only one face that my mother would
have described as "looking like thunder." The owner of the said face also
had the only hand thatecent days. I have posted it below