It’s hardly surprising that people believe that Caroline Flint was expecting a seat in the cabinet when she expressed loyalty to Gordon Brown the day before she resigned.
Have a look at the interview below, where, after a minute or two, you can hear her saying: “.. and serving, if he wants me to, in Gordon Brown’s c-uhh-government.”
Given the context of the discussion, it's difficult to think of any word beginning with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ other than ‘cabinet’ that she so quickly aborted and corrected to "government".
The trouble with slips like this is that, as the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis, used to say “Once it’s out, it’s anyone’s.”
The interview is interesting in other ways too, as it includes quite a lot of breaches of one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely 'one speaker speaks at a time' (for more on which, see HERE).
You can also see an interesting first hand report on the interview HERE from Iain Dale, one of the interviewees.
1 comment:
That's hilarious. Absolutely hilarious.
Sadly, she was not the only one to be misled into believing she was being given a full place in the Cabinet.
You simply have to have a look at the list of "Ministers of State attending Cabinet", which bears a remarkable resemblence to the list of Ministers that were out backing Gordon Brown on Thursday night/Friday morning.
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