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Commentators pick out their high and low points of Ed Miliband's Labour party conference speech.

[subscription required] the authenticity of the speech:

"The Labour leader's speech yesterday reminded me very much of those early Tory speeches. The more this week that Mr Miliband has said that he gets it, the less I have believed that he does. The more he said he 'understood' voter concerns (rather than shared them) the more I wondered whether he really does. I think it was a speech where his instincts were telling him one thing while his script said something else. And this uncertainty transmitted itself to the audience."

the speech for being "all-things-to-all-men":

"There were no hostages to fortune in the speech: no promise to oppose cuts, or even reverse them; no promise to oppose deficit reduction; no promise to side with the unions in their militant campaign to protect public services - in other words, the jobs of their members; no promise to tax business or the so called rich any more viciously; no promise to squeeze the middle classes. Of course, this does not mean that none of those things will happen: but if failing to promise to do them keeps Labour rising in the polls, we can assume that will be fine by Miliband E and his adherents."

that Mr Miliband was an improvement on most at party conferences:

"The great conference set-piece speech is a monstrous construct - airy, artificial, usually dishonest, and often sprinkled with a tooth-aching icing of schmaltz. Not so Ed Miliband's first baptism in the terrible art. Here was a fresh tone of honesty and authenticity: he didn't say anything he didn't believe. When he talked about his values, unusually for most such speeches, he hit no false notes. Sincerity is worth bucketloads of tear-jerking rhetoric.
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"This was grown-up politics - no need for ritual assaults on his own party to please the rightwing press and no childish knock-about attacks on Cameron and Clegg."

The newspaper sketch writers cut apart Ed Miliband's performance.

The the Labour crowd cheered with relief that their new leader wasn't as bad as feared:

"'Vote for us! We're rubbish, but at least we admit it!' That was the rallying cry from Labour's new leader yesterday. The party, having chosen the spare Miliband, was fearful that he might be awful, a geek tragedy. The fact that he wasn't bad brought them stomping to their feet after a speech that sloshed and sprayed his predecessors with scorn."

[subscription required] Ed Miliband's physical appearance had an influence on the "new generation" theme of his speech:

"He looked so young up there, a too-tall teenager with great panda eyes and sticky-up hair. It was unnerving.
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"Everyone said that it was the speech of Ed Miliband's life but when you look 16 that doesn't seem like so much really. Behind him sat rows of youngsters, placed there, I must assume, to make Ed look like a grown-up."

The the speech repetitive:

"He said 'Let's be honest' eight times, which is seven times too many. He told the party how humble they had to be and then used 'proud' or 'pride' six times. 'Love' was in there more than it should have been and the birth of his son was slipped in just before 'as we rebuild our economy'.
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."It didn't feel or sound... new. Two-thirds of the content was voiced by David Cameron five years ago. Most of the rest praised Labour's record."

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