Poems for St George's Day

A few years ago, we had a St George's Day supper in the village pub, where part of the evening's entertainment involved giving people the first line of a limerick for them to complete.

The results included the following:

A bard from Stratford called Will
Never had enough strength in his quill.
He asked for Viagra,
But never could find her.
Forsooth Will, it's only a pill.

A bard from Stratford called Will

Drank some whiskey that made him quite ill.

Those three Scottish witches

Made him sick to the breeches.

Now he drinks Gin from a good English still.

Upon the road to Priddy Fair,

I met a maid with golden hair.

We argued all night

As to who had the right

To do what with whom and where.

There once was an English rose

With a large and roseate nose.

But it wasn't much fun

When the cold made it run,

And the drips that fell from it froze.

When Henry fought at Agincourt,

He found himself ten archers short.

"I must have the barrows

With plenty of arrows,

Or this battle will all come to nought."

P.S. Since posting these I've had an email with a rather more topical post-Budget theme:

A Scotsman called Gordon McBrown
Made the English grimace and frown
By taxing their wealth
With cunning and stealth.
But they noticed and voted him down.

Inspiring banking imagery for Budget day from Martin Luther King

I’m currently preparing for a trip to the University of Michigan next month, where I’ll be running a course for Genome scientists and giving a lecture in the Political Science Department.

So, quite by chance, I’ve spent most of Budget day rummaging through video clips to take with me and came across one of my all time favorites, namely Martin Luther King’s extraordinary use of what, on the face of it, might seem like a rather unpromising source of imagery during the early part of his ‘I have a dream’ speech.

When working with clients in the banking and finance sector, I sometimes find it quite difficult to convince them that they too could be making effective use of imagery to get their business points across.

Yet here we have someone developing an image drawn from banking to get a powerful political message across extremely effectively.

So, if you weren’t too inspired by Mr Darling’s speech earlier today, here’s something completely different: read, watch and enjoy.

MARTIN LUTHER KING:
In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned.

Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.

We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Budget speech boredom and television news tedium

It’s now thirty years since I first started recording political speeches during the 1979 general election – but I still don’t have a single budget speech in my collection.

They tend to be so long, boring and full of statistical detail and exaggerated claims about the wonderful things in store for us that there’s seldom much of interest to a speech anorak like me.

I did once manage to listen to the whole of a Gordon Brown budget speech, but the only reason I didn’t turn it off was that I was redecorating a room and didn’t want to mess up the radio with emulsion paint.

But we now have to suffer something that’s no less tedious than the budget speech itself, namely the way television news programmes report it to us.

If there’s one thing we can be sure of today, it is that scores of television news techies will have spent countless hours cooking up yet more awful slideshows to enable the likes of Messrs. Peston, Pym and Robinson to confuse us even more about what the Chancellor’s proposals really mean.

What news of the House of Lords scandal?

At the end of January, the media was full of stories along the lines of 'Four Lords - Snape, Taylor, Truscott and Moonie - have been accused of entering into negotiations, involving fees of up to £120,000, with a newspaper's reporters', together with various calls for further investigation by the police and parliamentary authorities.

Since then, I haven't heard anything more about it, and a quick search on Google reveals that there's hardly been a mention of it in any of the media since the end of January.

If the MSM has lost interest, I'd have thought it fertile territory for political bloggers to get their teeth into.

And, given my views on the House of Lords (HERE), I'd quite like to know what's going on.

When the young Paddy Ashdown surprised himself by the power of his own rhetoric

Last night I went to an enjoyable and nostalgic event hosted by Total Politics magazine, at which Paddy Ashdown was in conversation with Iain Dale about his autobiography A Fortunate Life (April, 2009).

Hearing him in ‘elder statesman’ mode reminded me of the earliest clip from an Ashdown speech in my collection -which may well have been the first time any of his speeches had ever appeared on television (see below).

It’s from the debate on cruise missiles at the Liberal Party Assembly in 1981, two years before he became an M.P.

If the then prospective parliamentary candidate for Yeovil possessed a suit, he certainly wasn’t wearing it that day, preferring to appear in a sweater and open necked shirt – though the podium unfortunately prevents us from seeing whether or not he was also wearing sandals.

This was Ashdown in post-military mode, barking out his lines to the troops at high speed and with a serious shortage of pauses. I’ve often used it as an example of how an inexperienced speaker can sometimes be surprised by the power of his own rhetoric. The audience (predictably) applauds after the third item in a three-part list, at which point he breaks off, looking vaguely surprised by what's just happened.



POSTSCRIPT: 7 YEARS LATER
Paddy subsequently changed his position on cruise missiles, for which he was rewarded with the nickname ‘Paddy Backdown’.

This continued to haunt him during the Ashdown v. Beith campaign for the leadership of the new party formed by the Liberal-SDP merger in 1988. According to his opponents, this change of heart was evidence of inconsistency and indecisiveness, therefore making him unsuitable for leadership.

The response from some of his supporters, which you won't be able to find in his autobiography, came in the form of a very neat contrast along the lines of:

"It’s a damn sight easier to knock sense into a charismatic person than it is to knock charisma into a sensible person."