Am I the only person who doesn't like David Cameron?

‘If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure,’ as John Kerry put it in his tilt at the US presidency in 2004. David ‘Look mum, no autocue!’ Cameron communicated much the same sort of message in his closing speech to the Tory party conference this afternoon.

He didn’t actually fail, so that probably qualifies as some sort of success in the notes-free speechmaking stakes. But that absence of notes did mean he seemed to be making it up as he went along when it came to actual facts or statistics.

A man named John Brookes, whose case he first raised at Prime Minister’s Questions in April, when Cameron said he was 67, had aged 13 years in the interim, with Cameron putting him at 80 in his conference speech. The Thames Barrier was said to have to be raised six times a year now instead of once every six years as originally planned. (The figures Cameron was searching for are 27 times in the first ten years of its operation and 66 times in the next ten.) And the Gobi desert was said to be expanding at a rate of 4,000 miles a year, if I heard him correctly – which rather renders the outcome of the next election, whenever it comes, redundant.

In truth, none of this detail will matter any more to the electorate than it did to the Tory conference-goers. The media, meanwhile, are so desperate for a semi-competent and credible Conservative leader that they would probably have been happy to gloss over anything short of Cameron having a complete seizure on stage.

So clear the decks for the election that Gordon Brown is looking increasingly unlikely to be able to refuse. ‘Battle is joined!’ as the Daily Mail’s front page wanted us to believe on Monday. Or Forward to the Future, as Cameron himself would probably prefer.

Oh, and by the way, the Facebook group ‘Am I the only person who doesn’t like David Cameron?’, which had 300 members when he unwisely referred to it in his speech, has 630 at the time of writing. I predict it will hit five figures overnight and six by the end of the week.

You can join it here: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2248466580