What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop

The staging of Conservative Party conferences was transformed under Margaret Thatcher with the help of Harvey Thomas, who'd previously been involved in organising Billy Graham's crusades to the UK.

One innovation, later copied by other parties, was to seat other delegates out of sight so that they couldn't be seen behind the speaker. This had the advantage of reducing potential distractions and of preventing the mass audience from being able to monitor how colleagues were reacting to a speech

Before Labour followed suit, for example, sitting behind Neil Kinnock during his leader's speech were Dennis Skinner and Alice Mahon, chatting and shaking their heads as some of the things he was saying.

Then there as the classic Newsnight interview in which Peter Snow took Frances Pym to task for not applauding in the right places and/or vigorously enough (as can be seen HERE).

This year's Tory conference managers have come up with an innovation that I don't understand and have yet to hear explained. Yesterday, William Hague got up to speak in front of an anonymous townscape. Manchester? A typical Tory suburb? Middle England? Or just what is it supposed to symbolise?

Whatever the answer, it certainly got me (and probably anyone else who was watching too) wondering what they're trying to tell us - thereby distracting us from concentrating as closely as we should have been doing on what he was actually saying (which could, I suppose, be the whole point of it).



Today, when George Osborne appeared, the same background seemed to have moved in closer behind the podium, which has got me wondering whether, by the time David Cameron gives his leader's speech on Thursday, we'll see him perched on the roof of one of the houses.



P.S. Later on in the afternoon when it was Ken Clarke's turn, the backdrop had moved backwards again, closer to where it had been when William Hague was speaking. Is it symbolising some sort of pecking order we don't know about, is it random or will all be revealed by the end of the conference?

Surely it's time someone coached Cameron to use a teleprompter

At the risk of being accused of blogging about the same point too much, I was astonished to see a clip on the BBC TV's 10 o'clock News tonight of David Cameron speaking at the Tory Party conference in which he showed, yet again, that he's ignored the advice I gave him a year ago about spending far too much time looking at one of the autocue screens without looking in the other direction.

At one stage in today's excerpt, he spent 22 seconds looking to his right before managing to drag his head away to look at the other half of the audience on the other side of him.

It was also noticeable when he spoke at the Open University in May (HERE).

Nor is he alone, as Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown suffer from the same problem, as too did Margaret Thatcher (HERE).

What really flabbergasts me is that the advisors of politicians in such front-line positions don't seem to notice the problem or, if they do, they don't seem to think matters enough to do something about helping their bosses to solve it.

After all, reminding and coaching someone to remember to look from side to side more frequently is hardly the most difficult technique to get across, however busy and important their bosses might be.

What's more, there's plenty of time between now and his big speech on Thursday to fix it. And, needless to say, I shall be watching with interest.

Boris Johnson's funny bits

Today's heading is how ITN refers to the speech by the Mayor of London at the Conservative Party conference in their YouTube posting - and, as you can see from the full version (HERE), it only singles out some of the funny bits from 15 minutes that included some quite serious points not mentioned in this sequence.

Does it matter? Probably not, because if Boris Johnson wasn't such 'a character', he probably wouldn't have been elected to be Mayor of London in the first place.

Meanwhile, it's got me wondering whether I've seen any comparable 'characters' since I started taping and observing party conferencs 30 years ago.

So far, the best I've been able to come up so far are only 'possible' candidates, as they're not really in the same league on the comedy front: Rhodes Boyson (Conservative), Dennis Skinner (Labour) and Cyril Smith (Liberal).

I'd be fascinated to hear of any other nominations you might have.

Claptrap 6: An offer I couldn't refuse


This is the sixth in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voicesand the televising of Claptrap by Granada Television.

Part 1: Claptrap - The Movie
Part 2: Eureka!
Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre
Part 4: How to get a book published

The conference at which I'd had the unexpected chance to show some of the results of my forthcoming book to people from the media was only a week or two before the Chesterfield by-election that was scheduled for 1st March, 1984 - and where former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn, who'd just lost his seat in parliament, was standing as the Labour candidate.

A bird in the hand?
Peter Snow, one of the presenters of BBC 2's Newsnight, had been at the conference - after which, he was quick to phone me about going on the programme on the night of the by-election. I had, after all shown quite a few video clips of Mr Benn in action during my presentation, and had devoted several pages to his extraordinary speaking abilities in Our Master's Voices.

Although I was a regular viewer of Newsnight in those days, I knew that there weren't very many of us. Nor did five minutes on BBC 2 at dead of night seem the most promising way to promote the book - especially when someone from World in Action, with it's many millions more viewers, had told me not to sign up with anyone else until I'd spoken to him.

Over the next few days, there were more flattering calls from Newsnight urging me to agree to do an analysis of of Mr Benn - but still no word from Gus Macdonald of Granada. Had he really meant it, I wondered, or was it just conference ale and camaraderie that had been speaking? Should I commit to the BBC's bird in the hand or keep waiting for Granada's unspecified bird in the bush?

There was only one thing for it. Dreading another rejection to add to my collection from publishers (Claptrap 4), I steeled myself and dialed the number on Gus Macdonald's card.

Or a bird in the bush?
"Ah, I'm glad you've called" he said (much to my relief). "I've had an idea I'd like to talk to you about and was about to phone to suggest meeting for lunch."

Granada's London offices were in Soho, where I soon found myself at a Chinese restaurant being confronted with an offer that seemed far too good to be true.

"We'll find someone who's never made a speech before," he said, "then we'll film you coaching her on the stuff in your book and see what happens when she speaks at a party conference."

"But" - I'd never claimed it was a 'how to do it' book, had no idea whether the findings could be put into practiceand asked the obvious question: "What if it doesn't work?"

"Doesn't matter," he said "we'll just fade it out and roll the credits as she's climbing up to the podium. It would be a far more interesting way to tell the story of your research than all these boring Horizon programmes with professors droning on in front of rows of book shelves."

He'd even worked out that it would have to be someone from the SDP, because the new party had rules that would more or less ensure that a member would get to speak if they got their names down soon enough - whereas speakers at Labour Party conferences had to catch the eye of the chair and speakers at the Conservative Party Conference had to be vetted in advance. In any case, he knew the SDP president, Shirley Williams, and was pretty sure he'd be able to get her to call our Eliza Doolittle to speak.

And an Eliza, rather than and Edwin, Dolittle it would have to be, because this was the age of Margaret Thatcher and it was well known that she'd had a lot of help with speech-making and presentation.

To say I was taken aback by the idea would be an understatement. He was offering me the chance and the funding to carry out an experiment that I knew the Social Science Research Council would never have supported in a million years. Admittedly there was the rather large risk of putting my research on the line in front of 15 million viewers, rather than a few hundred readers of a learned journal. But if I'd been afraid of taking risks, I'd have had more sense than to go into conversation analysis in the first place.

Would a failed speech have been screened?
In retrospect, there are two reasons why I don't believe for a moment that Granada would have gone ahead and shown the programme if the experiment hadn't worked - however neat a way of telling the story it might have been.

One reason was that no contract had ever been written down or signed, which presumably meant that they could easily have ditched it and shown something else in the event of failure.

Another is that I learnt from Ann Brennan, after she'd won her standing ovation, that she too had asked the same question, "What if it doesn't work?", the night before she made the speech.

Gus's reply to her was rather different and more forthright than the one he'd given me six months earlier:

"It would just mean that the book's no b****y good."

Reading between the lines of 'Labour Vision'

In 1981, John Heritage and I video-recorded (on Betamax) the entire broadcast output of the three main party conferences, colleting a data base of about 500 speeches.

Today, the internet has not only made life much easier for rhetoric and oratory anoraks like me, but it can occasionally throw up some intriguing surprises, an example of which sprang out at me this morning.

Looking back on this year's Labour Party conference, I thought I'd have a look at some videos of speeches by likely candidates for the leadership when Gordon Brown (or the electorate) finally decides it's time for him to go.

The most obvious place to look was the 'Labour Vision' collection on YouTube, which is presumably put there by the party itself.

I've already mentioned the idea of 'noticeable absences' in relation to this year's speeches by Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. But here, on 'Labour Vision' there's another very noticeable absence - of three likely candidates for the leadership when the time comes.

'Labour Vision' will let you watch this year's conference speeches by Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling, Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper.

But notable by their absence are the speeches by three of the younger generation of likely leadership contenders: Andy Burnham, David Miliband and Ed Balls.

This raises some interesting questions:
  1. Why they are these three missing?
  2. Who decided to omit them from the menu on 'Labour Vision'
  3. Is someone trying to tell us that Miliband junior and Mrs Balls are ahead of Miliband senior and Mr Balls in the leadership stakes?
  4. Or could it be that none of them are considered good enough communicators to risk broadcasting their speeches to a wider audience?
It would be nice if someone in the Labour Party could tell us, but I don't suppose they will.

OTHER CONFERENCE SEASON POSTS:

What do Harriet Harman and Sybil Fawlty have in common?

One of the many memorable lines from Fawlty Towers was when Basil told Sybil that she ought to go on Mastermind, special subject "the bleeding obvious."

Until today, I'd always thought that Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, had rather more about her that Mrs Fawlty.

Technically, it was hard to fault the way she brought this year's party conference to a close, deploying as she did, repetition and a 3-part list.

But take a closer look at the content of what she said:

Together we'll fight for those we represent.
Together we'll fight for a prosperous and fair Britain.
And most important, conference, together we'll fight to win.


And consider whether any politician of any party (other than perhaps the Monster Raving Loony Party) could have said the opposite:

Together we'll fight for those we don't represent.
Together we'll fight for an impoverished and unfair Britain.
And most important, conference, together we'll fight to lose.


What, I wonder, would Basil Fawlty have had to say to Harriet? "Special three subjects the bleeding obvious"?

The Hateful Daily Mail

This is the first time I've ever lifted a title verbatim from someone else's blog.

It's taken from one of the UKs top political bloggers, Iain Dale, who is rightly complaining to the Press Complaints Commission about an article by Ephraim Hardcastle in today's Daily Mail, which includes the following classic piece of Mail hatefulness:

Overtly gay Tory blogger Iain Dale has reached the final stage of parliamentary selection for Bracknell, telling PinkNews: 'I hope any PinkNews readers who live in Bracknell will come to the open primary on October 17 to select their new candidate.

You don't even have to be a Conservative to attend.'

Isn't it charming how homosexuals rally like-minded chaps to their cause?


You can read more about why Iain Dale is complaining and how to support him HERE. And, if you have red hair, or have any friends, relations or loved ones with red hair, take a deep breath before reading on.

Down with red heads - Mail exclusive
As for why I think it important enough to mention the Mail' at all, let alone its latest slur, it's to remind people that they've been peddling this kind of 'overtly' prejudicial journalism for decades.

One of the most scurrilous pieces I ever saw came from the pen of Ann Leslie, who's supposed to be so worthy and respectable that her services to journalism have been honoured by her elevation to Dame of the British Empire.

On the day before one of the general elections in which Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour Party (1987 or 1992), the Mail published a two page spread with a perceptive article by Ms Leslie urging their readers not to vote Labour.

The headline summed it up with a warning never to trust a man with red hair (even though, at the risk of sounding baldist, Kinnock didn't have a lot of it left even then).

In fact, according to this erudite award-winning journalist, it would be too much of a risk ever to vote anyone with red hair into Downing Street. She developed her case in nauseating detail, listing every unfounded stereotype about the allegedly negative characteristics and temperament of 'red heads' that anyone has ever heard of - presenting them, of course, as established facts of life.

So, if it's any comfort to Iain Dale, he can at least breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn't have red hair.