Burnham, Kinnock and the danger of speaking in a sports stadium

Andy Burnham, Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, was no doubt as surprised by the hostile response from the crowd of 30,000 Liverpool supporters at Anfield yesterday as Neil Kinnock was by the adulation he received from the 10,000 Labour supporters at the fateful Sheffield Arena election rally in 1992.

As it turned out, both of them fell victim to the unpredictable spontaneity of a mass audience – which should perhaps remind our politicians to think twice before making any more speeches in a sports stadium.

Derek Draper – another psycho-therapist who talks too much and listens too little?

I recently posted a note about Derek Draper breaking a basic rule of turn-taking in conversation (‘one speaker at a time’), illustrated by a video of him and Paul Staines being interviewed by Andrew Neill.

Since then, I’ve come across a transcript with more examples of Mr Draper interrupting a co-interviewee, this time former Tory cabinet minister John Redwood – and another case where the interviewer intervenes to put a stop to it (full transcript HERE) – which suggests that the earlier observation may not have been an isolated instance:

Redwood: "Well he was the chief regulator of them, he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer running a tripartite regulatory system…
"

Draper: "Of course he wasn’t the regulator, the regulation was at arm’s length."

Redwood: "Derek you have to let me speak occasionally."
…

Redwood: "They allowed the banks to borrow and lend…
"

Draper: "You don’t think that perhaps…
"

Interviewer: "Hang on, hang on, let him finish."

Bearing in mind that Mr Draper is some kind of psycho-therapist, this and the earlier exchange with Andrew Neill are consistent with something I’ve noticed about the conversational style of quite a few people who’ve made a late career decision to go into counselling of one kind or another, namely that they tend to be (a) very talkative and (b) not very good at listening to what anyone else has to say.

Given that being a good listener is presumably essential if you’re going to be any good at helping people with their problems, I’ve often wondered if psycho-therapy and counselling are occupations that, for some mysterious reason, attract square pegs into round holes.

And my hypothesis is certainly not undermined by the low ratings and negative comments by readers in the Amazon customer reviews of Mr Draper’s recent book on the subject.

A smear that never was

During the election of a new leader for the new party formed after the merger of the SDP and the Liberal Party in 1988, there was talk of a possible smear that could have gone either way.

Those of us on Paddy Ashdown’s campaign team got wind of the fact that supporters of his opponent, Alan Beith, had recruited a handwriting expert to analyse a sample of Paddy’s writing without revealing whose writing it was - in the hope that it might reveal some character flaw that might damage his chances of winning.

But the expert apparently disappointed them by saying that he/she had never before seen ‘leadership’ jumping so forcibly off the page - which meant that they had more reason to hide the news than to leak it to the media.

Needless to say, we thought this was hilarious, but it did raise the question of whether or not it would be to our advantage to let the media know that the Beith camp had been cooking up a dirty trick that had rebounded on them by showing that our candidate’s handwriting oozed ‘leadership’.

I’m pleased to say that our decision not to leak the story to the press was unanimous.

Two decades later, and in the light of recent smear stories, I find myself wondering whether we would have been quite so virtuous had the polls and projections not already been showing that Paddy was almost certain to win - a luxury not enjoyed by Gordon Brown's entourage.