Max Atkinson's Blog

Did David Miliband lose because he was too old and experienced?

A killer line from Ronald Reagan, then aged 73, in one of the 1984 TV debates with Walter Mondale (56) came when he said that he was not going to exploit for political purposes his opponent's youth and inexperience (HERE).

The joke served him well, but wouldn't work at all in the UK today - where increasing youthfulness and inexperience has been steadily becoming the norm among our leaders since Harold Wilson became Prime Minister at the tender age of 48 - as can be seen from the following two tables.

Table 1: Age and experience of current UK main party leaders

Age on

becoming leader

Years as an MP before

becoming leader

Miliband

Cameron

Clegg

Table 2: Age and experience of Prime Ministers since Wilson

Age on

becoming leader

Years as an MP on

beoming leader

Callaghan

Brown

Wilson

Thatcher

Heath

Major

Blair

'The torch has passed'?

Having heard Ed Miliband repeatedly reminding us that the Labour Party has passed to 'a new generation', I've been half-expecting him to go the whole hog and recycle the rest of a famous line from John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech about the torch having been passed to a younger generation.

But I don't think he will, because Kennedy wasn't just talking about youthfulness, but about what his generation had experienced:

"the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace ... "

For our current party leaders, the risk of evoking Kennedy is that the experience of active service in a world war contrasts rather too obviously with the that of 'being tempered by spending pretty much the whole of your adult life working for and as professional politicians'.

Or has the candle gone out?

When Anthony Eden (aged 58) took over from Winston Churchill (aged 81) as leader of the Conservative Party in 1955, my late mother-in-law considered him "far too young and inexperienced for the job of Prime Minister."

A bit extreme by today's standards, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if we've reached a point where the risk of being led into the next general election by someone as ancient as 50 may have played a part in Labour's rejection of David Miliband in favour of his younger brother.

Ed Miliband "gets it" in his bid to bond with the brethren

A problem for Oxford-educated Labour leaders is how to bond with the masses in general and the core vote in particular.

Harold Wilson did it by retaining enough traces of a Yorkshire accent to sound like 'one of them'.

In interviews and chat shows, Tony Blair occasionally (and rather unconvincingly) lapsed into 'Estuary English', inserting glottal stops at points where he would more usually have used a perfectly enunciated 't' sound.

Glo'al stops in Donny?
Having spent five years at school in Doncaster, I've often wondered how the town's most famous MP, having been parachuted into a safe seat by the Labour Party high command, was managing to get along with the locals.

One thing I'd already noticed was that Ed Miliband seems even keener than Tony Blair on glottle stops. You'll hear quite a few of them in this clip, even though they're quite alien to the regional accent in that part of South Yorkshire - where the sound is typically heard as proof that the speaker must be 'a bloody Southerner.'

"I get it..."
In yesterday's leadership acceptance speech (which can be seen in full HERE), another ploy was on show with the repetitive use of contemporary youthful jargon, in which the verb "to get" is preferred to more traditional verbs like to understand, to know or to appreciate - six times in a row in this particular sequence.

Now that Mr Miliband has got it (by which I mean, in case there's any ambiguity, the leadership of the Labour Party), it will be interesting to see whether he's got any more such folksy devices up his sleeve as he bids to bond with the broader masses.

Also of possible interest:

Labour Party leaders' acceptance speeches: Neil Kinnock, 1983; Ed Miliband, 2010

With the winner of the Labour Party leadership election to be announced over the weekend, the Miliband brothers and their speechwriters must be hard at work on the acceptance speech.

As they were children when Neil Kinnock was elected party leader in 1983, they may not have paid much attention to what was widely regarded at the time as a minor classic.

So to inspire them in their efforts, and allow others among us to wallow in nostalgia, here it is.

Introduced by the chair as a "wee, wee speech if it's possible" (!), it takes him about 2-3 minutes to get up a decent head of steam - but, after that, it's well worth watching:

Kinnock Part I (about 6 minutes):

Kinnock Part II (about 7 minutes):

P.S. Miliband's Acceptance Speech, (starts 2 minutes in) 2010:

You can now compare Neil Kinnock's effort directly with that of the new leader. A first impression that rather surprised me after a couple of viewings was that, compared with his mentor's speech, Miliband's script seemed a bit lacking in substance.

More lessons from Vince Cable's speech

A few weeks ago, I blogged, not for the first time, about the Business Secretary's speeches under the heading If you can't remember Vince Cable's best lines, nor can he!

And there were some pretty good lines in yesterday's speech at the LibDem conference that both got the audience going and were picked up by the media.

Yesterday, I blogged about what struck me the oddest moment in the speech (HERE), when the audience took three seconds to get their hands apart on being told that we must make sure that the coalition is good for the Liberal Democrats as well - echoing as it did an extended delay before the applause started at a similar point in Nick Clegg's conference speech (HERE).

Today, I've been intrigued by a few more potentially instructive details.

1. Applause for the 3rd item in a 4-part list

This first clip, from his opening reminded me of a speech from years ago by Neil Kinnock, who produced a sequence of five consecutive rhetorical questions - and the audience applauded after the third one.

Here, Cable's script lists four of his achievements since coming to office - and the audience comes in after the third one.

Notice also that he moves to "I've concluded that" immediately and with no gap after completing the fourth item, but that the audience interrupts his attempt to continue with another burst of applause - creating the (positive) impression that they're so enthusiastic that showing approval is more important than letting him continue to his concluding punch-line:

2. Why did 'Yah-boo' contrasts prompt delayed applause?

During the election, I blogged about how Vince Cable had shown that 'Yah-boo politics can win victories for the LibDems' during the TV Chancellors' Debate.

Although contrasts are among the most reliable ways of triggering applause, especially when used to construct an attack on opponents, there were at least two examples in yesterday's speech where they didn't work quite as well as they could have done.

In the first one, it may have been because the key word in the second part of the contrast - "hindsight" - wasn't delivered clearly enough. On first hearing, I thought he said "unsight" or "insight", and had to check the text of the speech to discover that it was actually "hindsight".

If the audience in the hall had the same problem, it's hardly surprising that it took a while for the penny to drop:

In this next example, he's also attacking the Labour Party, but there's another two seconds pause between the end of the second part of the contrast ('plan A') and the applause getting under way.

As for why this delay happened, two factors may have played a part. One is that, after ending the first part of the contrast ('plan B') with rising intonation, it would have worked better if he'd used more decisively falling intonation to finish off the second part.

The second is that, when using a teleprompter, the eyes stay looking up in the air, implying that the speaker is going to carry on - and can create ambiguity in the minds of the audience as to whether or not he's finished. As can be seen in the videos posted HERE, this was quite a problem for Mrs Thatcher when she abandoned hard copy on a lectern in favour of reading from an Autocue (after which, her applause rate fell significantly).

All of which is to suggest that Mr Cable could move his performance up a notch or two with a bit more practice at reading from autocue screens.

Other teleprompter posts:

Delayed applause for the coalition in Vince Cable's conference speech (at exactly the same point as in Nick Clegg's)

After the Deputy Prime Minister's leader's speech at the Liberal Democrat's conference, I posted a clip in which the audience delayed for two seconds before applauding when he said that the party could not be expected to be taken seriously if they had not joined in a coalition government (HERE).

I also pointed out that a delay of anything more than one fifth of a second is likely to be heard by viewers/listeners as significant.

But today there was an even longer delay of three seconds before they applauded after Vince Cable, deputy leader and Secretary State for Business in the coalition government, said this about the coalition government:

"we must make sure that it's good for the Liberal Democrats as well."

Evidence of weak support for the coalition by LibDem acivists?

There are two reasons why this extended delay was potentially even more significant than the one in Clegg's speech:

It was not only the third "it's good for" in a row, but was announced as the final one in the list by the word "and..."
It only attracted a pitiful four seconds of applause.

As regular readers of this blog (and/or) my books) will know, audiences regularly applaud after the third item in a 3-part list - and 4 seconds is only half the 'normal' duration of 8±1 seconds for a burst of applause.

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