Max Atkinson's Blog: Brown

Showing posts with label Brown. Show all posts

Perfect book for April Fools Day: 300 pages of Gordon Brown's speeches

No, it's true.

It really isn't an April Fools day joke.

It's the day we've all been waiting for.

My publishers (Random House) have decided that 1st April is the perfect date for releasing a book of speeches made by Gordon Brown in the two years since he managed to get rid of Tony Blair.

How on earth did he find a publisher?

As I'm quite an expert on the difficulties of getting books published (for more on which see HERE) and on how awful most of his speeches are, I can't help wondering how he managed to find a publisher at all.

All I can think of is that the CEO of Random House is Gail Rebuck, who also happens to be the wife of Philip Gould (aka Baron Gould of Brookwood) - close advisor to Tony Blair and New Labour on polling, spin and anything else to do with communication that you can think of.

So was it the New Labour network that landed a publisher for Brown, or does the April 1st publication date mean that it's a not very subtle form of Blairite revenge?

And/or:

If you don't feel like buying the book, you can always browse through this selection of posts about Brown's speech-making - which, rather worryingly, is beginning to make me think that I might have another 300 page book on his speeches ready for 1st April 2011:

What's 'news' about Gordon Brown not answering a question?

The silly season doesn’t get much sillier than when the leading story on all of tonight’s leading news programmes on radio and television was the apparently astonishing fact that that Gordon Brown had not answered a question about his position on the release of the Lockerbie bomber during today's Downing Street press conference.

It raises the question of whether all our top journalists have been asleep since Brown first emerged as a leading Labour politician more than a decade and a half ago.

Otherwise, they would surely have noticed that he has never knowingly answered any question ever put to him - and that more of the same hardly counts as 'news' (for more on which, see HERE).

How many numbers can you get into a minute?

A few months ago, I made the point that Gordon Brown tends to pack far too much information into his speeches and still has to take notice of a crucial tip from Winston Churchill about simplicity.

In his final press conference before the Summer recess, he was at it again. At one stage, as you can see below, he managed to mention nine numbers in less than a minute.

The trouble is that a lot of people glaze over when numbers come at them so thick and fast – a problem that’s even worse if, as in this case, they’re delivered in a flat monotonous tone of voice.

And the importance of speakers conveying enthusiasm for their subjects cannot be overestimated – for the very obvious reason that, if a speaker sounds bored by his or her subject matter, why should the audience feel any less bored, let alone be inspired by it?

Add to this Mr Brown’s earnest facial expression and it's hardly surprising that he’s so often referred to ‘dour’.

Clarke has more to say about Brown than a few weeks ago

In the wake of Labour's loss of the Norwich North by-election, it looks as though former Home Secretary Charles Clarke is less reluctant to tell us what he thinks of Gordon Brown than he was five weeks ago.

Here's what he said then:

Q: "Will you tell us what you think about Gordon Brown?"
A: "No."

But today's BBC website has rather more detail on what Mr Clarke thinks of Mr Brown now:

Ex-home secretary Charles Clarke blamed the result on Mr Brown's "incompetent" treatment of outgoing MP Dr Ian Gibson … Mr Clarke - the MP for neighbouring Norwich South and a long-time critic of the prime minister - said there had been no "guiding principles" to the prime minister's handling of the expenses scandal.

"What happened to Ian Gibson was not fair and many, many people felt that," Mr Clarke told the BBC. "You need the transparency, you need a comprehensive approach, you need fairness and you need it to be done quickly and these things didn't happen."

More standup comedy from Gordon Brown

The story about Ronald Reagan that Gordon Brown told at the TED conference the other day wasn’t the only one that got a laugh from the audience (see previous post).

He also had one about singer Amy Whitehouse and Nelson Mandela. It was a neat example of the puzzle-solution technique illustrated last week with clips from Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and William Hague.

Puzzle: “Amy Whitehouse said “Nelson Mandela and I have got a lot in common.

Solution: “My husband too has spent a long time in prison.”

But I was always taught that you shouldn't laugh at your own jokes, and this would surely have worked better if he hadn't done so.

Standing ovation for Gordon Brown after anecdotes about Reagan, Cicero and Demosthenes

A couple of days ago, Gordon Brown took time out from local problems, like today’s by-election, to make a surprise appearance at the TED Global conference, and one can’t help wondering if the chance to give a lecture in Oxford marked the official start of his exit strategy into teaching that he was dropping hints about a few weeks ago.

You can see the whole of his TED performance at the bottom of this page and inspect a brief review of Twitter responses HERE.

Readers of my books will know that I give great emphasis to the importance of anecdotes in effective speeches and presentations, and there are two nice examples of this in Mr Brown's speech.

The first one came as he tried his hand at a bit of standup with this story about what Ronald Reagan is alleged to have thought of the then Swedish prime minister, Olaf Palme:

Then, right at the end came another anecdote involving a contrast between the way audiences used to respond to Cicero and Demosthenes. Brown firmly identifies himself with the latter and gets a positive reaction that doesn’t often happen to him outside Labour Party conferences – a standing ovation - and it doesn't often happen to anyone in Oxford either (or at least, I never got one when I worked there).

The whole unedited 16 minute speech can be watched below. And, as you'll see from the first few minutes, someone must have advised Mr Brown that, if you must use PowerPoint, you can't beat genuinely visual slides like pictures:

Gordon Brown's tough decisions and/or rehearsal for defeat

In case you missed Gordon Brown’s last press conference before the Summer recess, here’s the ‘Top Story’ on the No 10 website today:

Government taking “tough decisions” on economy – PM
The Government has taken “tough decisions” to tackle the recession and reduce its impact, the Prime Minister has said.

Speaking at his final Downing Street press conference before the summer recess, Gordon Brown said it was a challenging time for the country, but ministers had put in place “considerable” measures to help British businesses and families.

The Prime Minister also set out what the Government is doing to prepare for an increase in swine flu cases, and took questions on Afghanistan.

Read more: Government taking “tough decisions” on economy - PM

Curiously, if you do click to read more, you won’t find any mention of a question about tomorrow's Norwich North by-election.

Luckily, however, the Channel 4 News website does show us the the question and 'answer' under the headline ‘a rehearsal for by-election defeat’.

Here's how reporter Gary Gibbon introduces the video:

'Gordon Brown at his press conference just now sounded like a man rehearsing his lines for Friday when Norwich North looks like getting a Tory MP.

'He said he thought “people do understand the uniqueness of this by-election” in answer (or rather in reply) to a question about why he deselected Ian Gibson.'

See what you think:

'Sound-formed errors' and humour

Last December, I suggested that Gordon Brown’s gaffe when he said that he’d saved the world was probably the result of what Gail Jefferson, one of the founders of conversation analysis, referred to as a ‘sound-formed error’ – because there were four ‘wuh-’ sounds in quick succession just before the word ‘world’ popped out of his mouth – which he quickly corrected to ‘banks’.

Whether or not it really was a ‘sound-formed error’, we shall never know for certain, but there's no doubt that it was a mistake that caused widespread amusement.

There’s also no doubt that you can sometimes use this type of error with deliberately humorous intent , as is nicely illustrated by whoever wrote this TV commercial for Berlitz language courses:

(Gail Jefferson's original paper on the subject is HERE, and many of her other publications can be downloaded from HERE).

Lord Mandelspin strikes again

The bloggers' verdict on this morning's interview of Peter Mandelson by Andrew Marr seems to be that the former ran rings around the latter (e.g. HERE).

But it's hardly surprising given that the only proper job Mandelson had before he went into politics was as a back room boy on LWT's Weekend World for Brian Walden, one of the finest interviewers ever seen on British television.

As for whether or not it's a good idea to allow spin doctors to migrate from behind the scenes to centre stage is arguably much more debatable than Gordon Brown seems to think. Or perhaps the P.M. is the only person in the country who has forgotten the troubles associated with his new deputy's various departures from Blair governments.

My problem, whenever I see Lord Mandelson on the screen, is that it always reminds me of Rory Bremner's brilliant impersonations of him, and I'd be very surprised if I'm the only viewer who can't get this image out of my head.

Gordon Brown’s honesty about the death of New Labour

The Prime Minister’s press conference yesterday has aroused much media comment about the gap between his declaration of paternally derived honesty and the apparent lack of it in his denial that he’d ever intended to sack the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But one thing that did come across as much more honest than perhaps even he realises, was his further confirmation that he has abandoned the language of New Labour.

Five years ago, when Brown and his cronies were briefing away about getting rid of Tony Blair, I wrote a piece (HERE) suggesting they were mistaken, and included the line ‘Blair and Brown were co-architects of New Labour, even though Brown now seems obsessed with deleting the phrase from his vocabulary.'

Nor was it just the phrase ‘New Labour’ that Brown stopped using all those years ago. Another is the phrase ‘public investment’.

Shortly after Tony Blair’s second election victory, I met one of his closest aides at a conference. As a student of language and communication, I had been intrigued by the way in which he and everyone else in the party had, since the birth of ‘New Labour’, only talked about ‘public investment’, ‘investment’ in health, education, social services, etc., but never mentioned the once more usual term ‘public expenditure’.

So I asked him if this preference for the word ‘investment’ was a deliberate ploy because it sounded more respectable and less worrying than words like ‘spending’ and ‘expenditure’ – to which he replied “Of course it is”.

But under Gordan Brown this key term in the original language of ‘New Labour’ has disappeared as completely as the phrase ‘New Labour’ itself.

As you can see in the following extracts from Mr Brown’s press conference yesterday, he is as relaxed in talking about public ‘expenditure’ as he is in boasting about it as an unquestionable virtue.

On this, at least, his performance arguably displayed a refreshing degree of honesty .

Pre-delicate hitches from the White House

The delicate nature of some recent news stories seems to have produced a deluge of ‘pre-delicate hitches’ (for more on which, see HERE).

Hillary Clinton was at it in response to the nuclear news from North Korea last week, as was Gordon Brown on Sunday when challenged about the Queen not being invited to the forthcoming 65th anniversary commemorations of D-Day.

So too, on the same delicate subject, was this White House spokesman who managed to produce an ‘uh’ at a rate of once every 3.5 words:

Journalist: Since Queen Elizabeth is the only living head of state who served in the armed forces during World War II, President Obama believes that she should surely be officially invited, doesn't he?

Spokesman: He does and uh uh we uh u are working with those involved uh uh to see if uh we could make that happen. Obviously –

Journalist: Wonderful!

How would Obama's rhetoric and oratory sound from a London back street?

With pageants like the annual trooping the colour and state opening of parliament by the Queen, occasional royal weddings, state funerals and even more occasional coronations, Britain normally excels at finely choreographed displays of pomp and circumstance.

But the inauguration of an American president is an interesting example of how a former colony can sometimes outperform the old mother country with a set-piece event that makes the arrival of a new British prime minister about as inspiring as the sight of someone changing planes at Heathrow Airport.

One key difference, of course, is that our American cousins are inaugurating a new head of state as well as a new head of government, whereas a British prime minister is no more than that: the prime minister of a Queen, who will carry on being head of state for the rest of her life, and without whose invitation politicians wouldn’t be able to form a government at all.

Another stark difference is 'location, location. location'. New US presidents speak from Capitol Hill, looking out over a classic masterpiece of post-enlightenment town design that stretches before them as far as the eye can see. New UK prime ministers speak from the front doorstep of a terraced house that has no front garden and opens directly on to a cramped London backstreet – not the most promising venue for stirring rhetoric and oratory.

The British version of the orderly transfer of power is at its most mundane when a new prime minister takes office because the majority party in the House of Commons has changed its leader between general elections, which means that there won’t even be any jubilant crowds celebrating the previous day’s victory (not that there’s room for much of a crowd in Downing Street anyway).

So the official schedule of events for the afternoon of 27th June 2007, when Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair, went as follows:

13.00: Blair says farewell to staff at No 10 Downing Street
13.12: Blair arrives at Buckingham Palace, where he tenders resignation to the Queen
13.30: Brown departs Treasury with wife Sarah
13.40: Blair leaves the Palace
13.51: Brown arrives at the Palace where the Queen asks him to form a government
14.48: Brown leaves the Palace
14.55: Brown enters No 10 Downing Street for first time as prime minister

Although the schedule makes no mention of a speech at 14.55, new prime ministers can’t just walk in without saying anything to the television cameras and reporters. But they hardly ever say anything that anyone ever remembers, and it’s an occasion that’s generated very few entries in dictionaries of quotations.

One apparent exception was Margaret Thatcher’s recitation of lines from St Francis of Assisi on the steps of Downing Street in 1979. But even that hardly qualifies as a real exception, as it was already a memorable quotation that had survived for about eight hundred years before being recycled by Mrs Thatcher (see video clip in blog entry of 1 January 2009).