At next week's European Speechwriters conference in Paris, Brian Jenner has asked me to run a breakout session on the afternoon of Friday 27th September - where the probable topic is the rhetorical skill (or otherwise) of new UK prime minister Johnson.
I'd strongly recommend anyone thinking of attending the session watches the above 10 minute interview with Michael Cockerell on BBC Newsnight, as it's one of the most revealing programmes about him that I've seen (and includes some early footage of the young Johnson as president of the Oxford Union Debating society).
Yesterday, I was one of the 2,000 people who assembled in Westminster Abbey for 'A Service of Thanksgiving for the life and work of the Right Honourable the Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon KCMG CH KB 1941-2018':
Of the six living UK prime ministers, four were there (see below) - one of whom, John Major, gave an excellent address. But Theresa May and Boris Johnson were not there.
When Paddy died last December, Mrs May said that he had "served this country with distinction" and "had dedicated his life to public service and he will be sorely missed." She was. of course, right. But an internet search reveals that our current journalist PM neither said nor wrote anything about this unexpected death that took everyone by surprise. And one can only assume that he was far too busy yesterday (consulting lawyers at our expense?) to be bothered to join the many other politicians and journalists who were there.
Left to right: Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, David Cameron, John Major
Apart from current and former LibDem MPs and peers, other from Westminster's great and the good who were there included Speakers John Bercow and Norman Fowler, Chris Patten, Shami Chakrabati, Peter Mandelson, Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine.
In other words, reps from different parties - but quite a few of the Tory elder statesmen have been sacked by Johnson and his Brexiteer cabinet cronies.
So not at all surprising that our Etonion-Oxford-educated PM didn't have the manners to show up yesterday. If I'd had the money to pay to educate my children so expensively, I'd ask Eton and Balliol for my money back....
On 19th August, The New European published the following:
Boris Johnson's new advisers are urging ministers to avoid Radio 4'sToday programme as they believe the programme is a 'total waste of time'.
According to the Mail on Sundaythe new director of communications at Downing Street Lee Cain has advised his colleagues to stop putting up ministers to appear on the programme.
The proposal has the support of Dominic Cummings who is reported to have declared last week: "I never listened to the Today programme for the entire year of the referendum and I intend to repeat this while I am here."
He said not to put ministers forward "unless they change format and actually start exploring serious subjects in a serious way".
During Boris Johnson's leadership campaign the only interviews he gave were with Sky News' Sophy Ridge and the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg.
He refused to give an interview to Radio 4's Today programme, instead turning up briefly on the station's World at One.
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Anyone curious to know more about Messrs. Cain and Cummings (for whom as taxpayers we are all paying) need look no further than Wikipedia which tells us about both of them:
Lee Cain is a British journalist and government appointee who currently serves as Downing Street Director of Communications under Boris Johnson. Cain was appointed by Johnson on 24 July 2019...
Prior to his appointment, Cain worked as Head of Broadcast for the Vote Leave campaign, in addition to serving at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs under Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove. He briefly worked for Theresa May before leaving to work with Johnson while he was serving as Secretary of Stated for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, Cain's former employer, The Daily Mirror has stated that was deployed to taunt former Prime Minister David Cameron and other Conservative MPs dressed as a chicken.
Dominic Cummings born 25 November 1971) is a British political strategist. From 2007 to 2014 he was a special adviser to the then Education Secretary, Michael Gove. In 2015–16 he was the campaign director of Vote Leave, an organization opposed to continued UK membership of the European Union and which took an active part in the 2016 referendum campaign on the subject. In July 2019 the new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, appointed him to the role of special adviser to the government.
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If you were surprised by Johnson's willingness to pick a cabinet so full of hard-line brexiteers, his selection of hardline brexiteer backroom boys is not surprising but totally predictable. It's not just that they were both deeply involved in the Vote Leave campaign, but Cain subsequently worked for other leading brexiteers like Leadsom and Gove.
Has our esteemed PM forgotten that his government has a majority of ONE - and that there are plenty of Tory MPs who are still keen remainers and/or opposed to leaving the EU without a deal?
Regular readers of Private Eyehave been eagerly awaiting the result of a referendum announced in edition a few weeks ago.
Published in July 2013 (above), it marked the news that the Duchess of Cambridge had given birth to Prince George.
THIS BLOG
Regular readers of this will know why I've juxtaposed "woman has baby" with "Oxford graduate becomes prime minister" - because neither event was a newsworthy surprise either in 2013 or 2019.
My last post began: "10 of the 14 (71%) UK prime ministers between 1945 and 2019 were educated at Oxford University. One, Gordon Brown, was educated at university in Scotland. None graduated from Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, or any other English university."
The arrival of Boris Johnson (B.A., Oxon.) at 10, Downing Street increases Oxford's score to 11 out of 15 (73%).
Although Johnson is an old Etonian and past president of the Oxford Union debating society
I'm not convinced he's anywhere near as good as Blair or Thatcher, not least because they both genuinely believed in what they were saying and thought that what they were doing would benefit the country as a whole, rather than their own personal ambitions.
I don't deny that Johnson is a master of PR, but it's time to BEWARE: he's just started using social
media.
Could it be because his hero President Trump has successfully exploited Twitter that Johnson has just started to use Facebook???
For the last few days, the mainstream media is citing this as evidence that Johnson's government is already planning for an early general election.
Other announcements like his latest promises to spend £billions of tax-payers' money building new prisons, making it easier for police officers to stop-and-search, etc., etc. confirm that we have extreme right wingers in charge who believe that voters will be taken in by their barmy rantings.
Oxford University's near-monopoly of political leadership
10 of the 14 (71%) UK prime-ministers between 1945 and 2019 were educated at Oxford University. One, Gordon Brown was educated at university in Scotland. None went to Cambridge, Durham, Manchester, London or any other English university.
Winston Churchill, James Callaghan and John Major became prime-minister without having had any formal higher education.
At the European Speechwriters Network conference in April, held at Queen's College, Oxford, I showed the following clip twice) before inviting the audience to rank the speakers according to which ones they thought the most effective.
It only went back as far as Harold Wilson - receiving an honorary degree at the then new university of Lancaster - in the 1970s. But the time available for my presentation wouldn't have been long enough to include every Oxford-educated PM since Clement Attlee.
This is the short clip that I showed and you now have the chance to do what the original audience did and decide for yourselves which were the most most effective speakers:
The next question is to decide on how each of the above compared with all the others?
1. Clement Attlee (Labour), University College, modern history
2. Sir Anthony Eden (Conservative), Christchurch College, modern languages
3. Harold Macmillan, Balliol College, Latin, Greek and ancient history
3. Alec Douglas-Home, Christchurch College, modern history
5. Harold Wilson, Jesus College (PPE*), then Fellow of University College
6. Edward Heath, Balliol College (PPE*) and organ scholarship, Keble College
7. Margaret Thatcher, Somerville College. chemistry
8. Tony Blair, St John's College, law
9. David Cameron, Brasenose College, PPE*
10. Theresa May, St Hugh's College, geography
(*PPE = politics, philosophy and economics)
Best Speaker?
After watching the first clip the audience at the European Speechwriters Conference (of about 100 from different countries in Europe) awarded the gold medal to Tony Blair, the silver medal to Margaret Thatcher and bronze to David Cameron.
Had it not been for his widely publicised attempt to unite a divided Tory party by holding (and losing) the brexit referendum, he might have beaten Thatcher to the silver medal. It was, after all, a ten-minute unscripted speech at a Conservative party conference beauty parade that had won him the leadership in the first place.
Of the other Oxonian PMs, Attlee would surely get the wooden spoon as the least inspiring public speaker, even though he presided over some of the most important post-war innovations like the foundation of the National Health Service.
Macmillan continued to be a brilliant speaker until he was well into his 90's. Home was apparently more interested in playing cricket than reading history at Oxford and isn't remembered for any famous speeches.
Wilson was arguably the first PM who understood how to make the most of television. Clip 5 shows his skill at dealing with hecklers. He was the first to call TV interviewers by their first names, thereby implying that they were good friends - and making it more difficult for them to ask hostile questions. Puffing his pipe, during interviews was a neat way to buy himself more time to work out an 'impressive' answer. And, unlike all the other Oxonians, he was the only one who managed to retain his Yorkshire accent during his years in Oxford. All of which enabled him to come across as 'a man of the people'.
Although from a similar middle-class background, Edward Heath lacked Wilson's ability to appeal to a mass audience and, though he'd negotiated the UK's successful entry into the European Common Market (later the European Union), he's remembered more for his public and continuing animosity towards his successor as Tory party leader (Margaret Thatcher) than for memorable quotations or speeches.
So we are left with Blair, Thatcher and Cameron as the most impressive recent Oxonian speakers.
Will yet another Oxford graduate take over from Theresa May?
Theresa May's most famous early speech was back in 2002, when, as Tory party chairman, she warned that many voters regarded the Conservatives as 'the nasty party'.
More recently she's been heard losing her voice during her leader's speech and at prime minister's question time in the House of Commons (see this blog, 13th March, 20019).
Yesterday the conspirators won and she announced that she would be quitting the party leadership in early June - so the party and the public would have to prepare itself for yet more internecine battles between ambitious Tories bidding for the top job.
The following are already being widely mentioned as candidates. Six of the nine are Oxford graduates, three went to 'provincial' universities (Exeter, Warwick and Reading) and therefore have little or no hope of winning.
Among the Oxonians, the dark horse is Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health and Social Care). Unlike, Messrs. Gove, Hunt, Johnson and Raab, he went to both Oxford (dark blue) and Cambridge (light blue).
Michael Gove, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (English)
Said Javid, University of Exeter (Economics and Politics)
Jeremy Hunt, Magdalen College, Oxford (PPE)***
Boris Johnson, Balliol College, Oxford (Latin, Greek and Ancient History)
Matt Hancock, Exeter College, Oxford (PPE),Christ's College, Cambridge (Economics)
Andrea Leadsom, University of Warwick, (Politics)
Penny Mordant, University of Reading (Philosophy)
Dominic Raab, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (Law)
Rory Stewart, Balliol College, Oxford (PPE)
Competition
A signed copy of my book Speechmaking and Presentation Made Easy will be awarded to the first person who accurately predicts the winner.
Starting date: Today
Closing date: The day before the winner is announced
