Forty years ago, Neil Kinnock used his conference speech to rally the faithful to his modernising agenda and to round on the scourge of the Labour movement, the so-called Militant Tendency.

Kinnock did not name names, he did not even mention where - because he did not have to.

Everyone in Bournemouth knew he was talking about Derek Hatton and the other leaders of Liverpool City Council, who had refused to set a budget because of a funding squeeze by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, culminating in 31,000 redundancy letters delivered to its staff, many by local cab firms.

It was Kinnock at his best, the finest platform orator of his generation - squaring up to his nemesis in a hall fizzing with conflicting passions and electricity.

Finger jabbing, perspiring and intense, he spat out these words with Welsh fire in his eyes: "...and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council, a Labour council, hiring taxis to scuttle around a city, handing out redundancy notices to its own workers."

History shows that Kinnock vanquished the hard left if only, in the end, to become the best Prime Minister the country never had.

Watching the sterile, forgettable fare on offer at the party conferences this autumn, what would one give to have seen a tiny quotient of that fervour; that heat.

Much of it was focus-group driven, button-pushing dross, carefully crafted to say little and conveyed with faux, stage-managed conviction, but which fell on the listener in the wider world with a deathly, disinterested phut. High on atmospherics, low on specifics, as someone once remarked about Bill Clinton's speeches.

Even Nigel Farage's address to Birmingham was more ham and razzmatazz than fire and fury.

On he came to fireworks, gurning and goofing, pointing and waving to imaginary people in the crowd, like Hillary Clinton in 2016.

The speech itself was typical Farage but it was no barnstormer. Pity, because he's meant to be the best speaker of the lot.

Political speech makers need good material. Margaret Thatcher’s “You turn if you want to, the lady’s not for turning” was genius, gallery pleasing simplicity.

Ian Paisley’s “We say never, never, never, never” rhetorical masterpiece, in defiance to Thatcher’s Anglo-Irish agreement, pounded out in front of hundreds of thousands around Belfast’s City Hall will never be forgotten and was probably the best of his many rabble-rousing moments.

One doesn't often hear a good speech in local politics, least of all from the tedious windbags who serve on planning committees, but over the years Dover has thrown up some memories for this observer.

Days after the 2005 General Election was called, Dover's Labour MP Gwyn Prosser, another Welshman, delivered a speech to a handful of RMT union members at in the town and which was dutifully splashed across his local paper (by yours truly) after declaring: "I have never bought into the New Labour project. I'm old Labour, not New Labour."

Innocuous enough, perhaps, but at the time it was the message that mattered. Reject Blair and his polenta-munching north London cronies and appeal to the ferry workers and stevedores down at the port.

By way of validation, the RMT union leader Bob Crow was also there that evening to nod sagely and give one of his off the cuff, rousing, noteless speeches. You’d pay to hear Bob in full flight.

It could be argued that Gwyn won the election that evening. It was no accident that a few local journalists had been invited along to an event they had no good reason to be at and wily old Gwyn knew exactly what he was doing.

Gwyn wasn’t there the night Lord (Maurice) Glasman came to Dover Town Hall and gave the most beautiful, exhilarating speech about what amounted to all that is good about Britain and being British.

From the man who has been a passionate exponent of Blue Labour, it was like listening to Billy Bragg’s Between The Wars but with gags. Later, the good Lord stood outside on the steps with members of the audience, drawing on a roll-up.

He came to Dover at the invitation of the then (now disgraced) Conservative MP Charlie Elphicke, who had dislodged Gwyn in 2010, in support of a community-led port.

A couple of years earlier, Charlie, while the Tory candidate, spoke at a rally to campaign for a new hospital in Dover, which was being spearheaded by a wheelchair-bound amputee called Reg Hansell, a former Labour leader of the district council. There were hundreds gathered outside the Maison Dieu, beside the town hall.

For background, it was said Reg and Gwyn didn’t exactly get on and, with irony not lost on Reg, Gwyn had fought the 1997 election campaigning (and ultimately failing) to save the town’s Buckland Hospital as a major facility.

Reg began to speak, calmly forwarding apologies for absence and, at the mention of holidaying Gwyn's name, there were boos and jeers.

In what was clearly a perfectly staged piece of choreography, the microphone soon found its way to Charlie who was perched on a ledge.

Pledging his heartfelt support, he told the crowd: "You know there's not much I can do. I haven't been elected and I don't run anything - in fact I'm not even elected to run a bath."

At the end, there were murmurs of assent and polite applause.

Reg later recalled: "It was hardly a standing ovation but, just at that moment, the most important thing was people listened...then I was pretty sure he'd be elected."

Proof, perhaps, of the power of the speech and that words do actually matter.