Think twice before you read or write

Late last night, Google Alerts took me to an article by Danny Finkelstein that was about to appear in The Times today about the point in David Cameron's speech last week where he surfed applause and which I'd written about a couple of times last week HERE and HERE.

Reading it at dead of night on a computer screen and in this morning's cool light of day in the actual (rather than virtual) newspaper yielded quite different reactions.

At first sight, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. But this morning, the questions that came to mind then look like an unhealthy cocktail of paranoia and megalomania (and I'd only had two nightcaps, honest).

As I know that some of my garbled twittering got a few people wondering what I was on about, a word or two of clarification may help to solve the mystery.

Here are the questions that troubled me last night, followed by my answers after reading the same article in a hard copy of the newspaper earlier today:

1. Should I be pleased to be referred to as a 'guru' by such an eminent journalist and glad that the speech that had changed my life had changed his life too (Claptrap 1)?

Ans: Yes.

2. As one who writes books and runs courses on the subject, should I be annoyed that he makes it sound as though speechwriting is such an easy and straightforward craft?

Ans: No.

3. Did his casual use of the phrase 'surfing applause', as if everyone knows what it is, and his focus on the poverty point in Cameron's speech mean that he'd been following my blog and was now recycling some of it without much in the way of attribution?

Ans: Don't know.

4. Was he saying or implying that Ann Brennan didn't mean what she said in her speech and/or that I had claimed that Cameron hadn't meant what he said?

Ans: No.

5. And why hadn't he mentioned any of my books on all this, or at least supplied a link to my blog?

Ans: Because he's a journalist and doesn't have to.

Memo to self:

Be wary of jumping to conclusions on the basis of reading articles on computer screens late at night.

Remember that computers and the internet have made it far easier to write and post things without anything like the amount of care and reflection that was necessary to get anything out to a wider audience in days gone by.

Memo to journalists:

Remember that, with 115,000+ books being published each year, it matters a very great deal to authors to have their books mentioned in the media occasionally, and that you have the power to open and close an important door to public awareness (or lack of it) of particular titles.

Regular readers will know that I've blogged on this before in relation to BBC plug-a-book shows. Today, the mere mention of my name in The Times has already prompted enough people to type it into Google to double the number of visits to my blog (and there are still about 5 hours to go until midnight).

Today has also seen Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy and Lend Me Your Ears rise to their highest positions in the Amazon UK bestsellers rankings since the last time they got a mention on the BBC website.

So I am grateful to Mr Finkelstein and The Times for today's small mercies - but not half as grateful as I would have been if one of the book titles had appeared in print and/or if there'd been a link to this blog from their online edition.

And that, I suppose, is what really explains the initial irritations that struck me in the early hours of this morning.

POSTSCRIPT (Thursday)

I take it all back! Danny Finkelstein has done me proud - and predictably, for 3 reasons, the third of which also comes in three parts:

1. Mention of the name seems to be enough, as indicated in the comment below from Mr Anonymous (plus various emails and phone calls I've received today.

2. Blog visits yesterday were three times more than on Monday.

3. Danny Finkelstein has done me proud with two posts on his Times Online blog this afternoon in which he

• mentions and links to one of my books and this blog,
• shows the YouTube video of Ann Brennan's speech at the 1984 SDP conference and
• ends with a hilarious story about how Roy Jenkins reacted to one of the best lines in the speech.

2009 Conference season summary

Quite a number of new visitors, to whom welcome, arrived here during the party conference season, which inspired, if that's not too strong a word, the following 27 posts.

You can link directly to them by clicking the title. The ones in italics include video clips or links to a video illustrating the particular point under discussion.

• The TUC, where ‘fings aint wot they used to be’

• Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak at the TUC?

• Gordon Brown tries out a 4-part list at the TUC

• Not the LibDem Conference –BBC website news

• Clegg’s conference speech: ‘definitely OK, absolutely fine, without any doubt not bad’

• Methinks Labour doth protest/spin too much

• Gordon Brown goes walkabout (again)

• Why doesn’t anyone warn politicians about becoming autocue automatons?

• If Mandelson has to struggle to win applause, what are the Labour Party faithful saying?

• Was it Mandelson’s self-deprecating humour that won the day for him

• Brown surfs applause (briefly) before reverting to type

• Gordon Brown: The way he told them

• Gordon Brown on the morning after the night before

• What do Harriet Harman and Sybil Fawlty have in common?

• Reading between the lines of ‘Labour Vision’

• Boris Johnson’s funny bits

• Surely it’s time someone coached Cameron to use a teleprompter

• What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop

• The barmy Tory backdrop disappears & reappears

• Does YouTube oppose the Tories and support UKIP?

• George Osborne + Chris Grayling = Geoffrey Howe

• Tory PR on the eve of Cameron’s speech: gaffe pr master stroke?

• I was wrong about Cameron looking at screens

• Cameron’s conference sound bite: ‘compassionate conservatism’

• Cameron’s conference speech high spot: standing ovation for ‘surfing applause’

• Surfing applause was Cameron’s high spot too

• Contrasting reactions to Cameron’s ‘poverty moment’

Words really do matter: Majorspeak revisited

A recent post by Martin Shovel on the Creativity Works blog uses the Wordle website to support an interesting argument that David Cameron is a better speaker than Gordon Brown because he used fewer words of Latin origin in his conference speech than the prime minister did in his.

This reminded me of something I'd written in Lend Me Your Ears in the section comparing written and spoken language (pp. 79-80):

Using words that are hardly ever heard in everyday speech will also make it more difficult for an audience to understand the point you’re trying to get across. For example, the two columns in the example below contain sentences that convey the same message, but the lines on the left and right use different words. Just how much difference the alternative wording makes to the degree of formality and comprehensibility becomes very apparent as soon as you try reading the two versions aloud.

Formal/written We shall endeavour to commence the enhancement programme forthwith in order to ensure that there is sufficient time to facilitate the dissemination of the relevant contractual documentation to purchasers ahead of the renovations being brought to completion.

Informal/spoken We shall try to begin the repairs immediately so that there’s enough time to send the contracts to buyers before the work is finished.

Apart from making it difficult to understand, the use of words of Latin origin helps to create what I sometimes refer to as a 'cloak of formality' that can make you sound much more stilted and 'unnatural' than you'd intended.

MAJORSPEAK

On this, the way former prime minister John Major spoke used to be a constant source of fascination to me and I once wrote a paper entitled 'Majorspeak' in a book on the 1992 general election. I also touched on some of his eccentricities in a television interview with Martha Kearney before his last conference speech before going to the polls in 1997.

In the following clip, look out for words like 'wayside inn' and 'whomsoever', not to mention the claim that he used to 'erect' a soapbox in Brixton market to talk about 'political matters of the day' - to which the good citizens of the aforementioned borough would respond with 'badinage'.

More recently, if I remember it correctly from when Sir John read his book on cricket on Radio 4's Book of the Week show, the opening line was "On the morrow of my election defeat, I bade farewell to Downing Street and proceeded to the Oval."

Monty Python's take on the expenses scandal

As MPs return to Westminster today to face the music on their expenses, here's some light relief on the subject from Monty Python:

An important but elusive asset for British political party leaders

Yesterday’s video clip of Jo Grimond, under whose leadership the Liberals doubled their number of MPs from ‘hardly any’ to ‘a few’, reminded me of an important but all too rare asset for party leaders in a country where elections are decided by a few floating voters.

Although my mother was a Tory, she was by no means the only one I knew who liked Jo Grimond and regarded him as a 'thoroughly good egg.'

Thousands of others from different parties thought much the same of Margaret Thatcher, Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair, all of whom enjoyed high levels of respect, however grudging, from voters who were not their party’s ‘natural’ supporters.

When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair, I started trying out this idea that some politicians have an indefinable appeal to voters across party lines on (an admittedly non-random sample of) people – and was amazed to discover how many ‘natural’ Tories said things like “I liked Blair and was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t feel the same about Brown. "

Which brings me to another question prompted by yesterday’s vintage interview, namely which other party leaders have had the benefit of the ‘je ne sais quoi’ factor enjoyed by Grimond, Thatcher, Ashdown and Blair?

I don’t think Heath, Callaghan, Major, Kinnock, Smith, Kennedy or Campbell had it (Vince Cable almost certainly has it, but can't be counted because he was only a temporary leader).

Nor, as far as I can see, do I think that any of the three party leaders currently getting up steam for the next election have it either.

But it would be interesting to know whether others have the same impression - and, if so, why?

Who were represented by the UK's political parties 50 years ago?

In 1959, the Liberal Party only had 6 members of parliament, compared with the Labour party's 277 MPs and the Conservative Party's 344.

In this clip from the run-up to the 1959 election, the then Liberal leader, Jo Grimond, tries to define a place for his party between the employers/Conservatives and the workers/Labour.

The wording of the question by interviewer Robert Harris reminds us just how clear and simple politics were 50 years ago.

As for where we are today, three questions spring to mind:

1. Was Grimond's answer merely wishful thinking (given that the Liberals still had only 6 MPs after the 1959 election), or a perceptive forecast of where politics was going?
2. Are the Conservative and Labour parties still closer to the employer/worker divide than either of them is willing to admit.
3. Now that the Liberal Democrats have 10 times more MPs than 50 years ago, does this mean that Grimond's 'new class' has indeed grown - only much more slowly than he was hoping for?

(P.S. More questions added in next post HERE).

Surfing applause was Cameron's high spot too!

David Cameron has just put a post on the Conservative Party's 'Blue Blog' saying that the high spot for him in his speech yesterday was the same one as I discussed earlier today, in which he so successfully 'surfed' applause:

"I will remember for a very long time that moment when the Party got to its feet and showed how much we want to beat poverty" - David Cameron.

Now he's discovered how to surf applause and what it feels like to get such an enthusiastic audience response, maybe he'll do it more often (as I recommended last year).

Cameron's conference speech high spot: standing ovation for 'surfing applause'

For me (and many in the media), the high spot of David Cameron's speech yesterday was the sequence in which he demononstrated that he can indeed 'surf' applause.

Commentators singled it out as evidence of 'passion', and it was widely replayed on prime-time television news programmes.

The reason why I was pleased to see the technique working so well for him was that, in one of the first posts on this blog, I'd suggested that he was a talented enough speaker to take a step further and have a go at using this important technique from the repertoire of great orators.

Although I hadn't then come across the word 'surfing' to describe the practice of carrying on speaking through applause, I'd discussed it 25 years ago in Our Masters' Voices, on which my blog post of 27 September 2008 was based.

As the odds are that you weren't one of the tiny handful of readers a year ago, here's what I wrote about surfing before David Cameron spoke at last year's Conservative Party conference:

TIME FOR CAMERON TO SURF APPLAUSE?

When it comes to speech-making, David Cameron has enjoyed more success than most British politicians of his generation. His short unscripted pitch for the party leadership in 2005 was enough to transform him from rank outsider to eventual winner. And his speech at last year’s conference was so effective that it was arguably one of the factors that helped to deter Gordon Brown from calling an election at a time when Labour were still safely ahead in the polls.

If Mr Cameron has already mastered most of the key techniques that set a good orator apart from an average one, the question arises as to whether there’s anything else he could be doing to take the next step into the premier league? And one thing he might like to consider is the art of surfing applause, a technique that’s only to be found among those at the top of their trade. Past maestros include Martin Luther King and Tony Benn, and today’s most prominent exponents are Nicholas Sarkozy and Barack Obama.

Unlike most speakers, surfers don’t just stop whenever the audience applauds and wait until they’ve finished. What surfers do is to carry on speaking after the applause has started, which creates a number of positive impressions. It makes it look as though you hadn’t been seeking applause at all, and are really quite surprised that the audience has interrupted you with an unexpected display of approval.

Then, if you keep trying to go on while the audience is still clapping, it’s as if you’re telling them that, unlike less passionate politicians, you’re the kind of person who regards getting your message across as much more important than waiting around to savour the applause. If you’re really lucky, and the broadcasters want to put this particular extract on prime time news programmes, the lack of any clean break between your speech and the applause makes it difficult for them to edit without including the adulation of the crowd as well – so that the various positive impressions are transmitted beyond the hall to the much bigger numbers viewing or listening at home.

On the plus side, Mr Cameron is already exhibiting the first signs of surfing in some of his speeches, but needs to carry through with a bit further if he’s to make the most of it. A sign that he was almost ready for fully-fledged surfing came in his 2005 conference speech, when he said:

“That is a stain on this country and this government [applause starts] and what is – [applause stops] -- and what is the government’s answer?”

This was all right as far as it went, but he didn’t have to stop after only a single attempt at carrying on and then wait for the applause to subside before speaking again. More experienced surfers don’t just make one aborted attempt to speak during the applause, but do it several times in a row, as in this example from Barack Obama:

“.. that threatens my civil liberties. [applause starts] It is that fundamental belief – [applause continues] -- It is that fundamental belief -- [applause starts to fade] It is that fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper, that makes this country work.”

The important thing is to make sure that you don’t say anything that really matters while the noise of the applause might still drown it out, because there’s no point in developing the message until you’re sure it will be audible.

Repeating the first few words, as Obama did in the above example, is probably the easiest and safest way of doing it, but it’s not the only option. Another is to keep adding a few more words each time until the applause has died down enough for people to be able to hear the fully formed sentence you want them to hear. Really experienced surfers develop a finely-tuned ear for the volume of applause that enables them to know exactly when it’s become quiet enough for it to be safe to carry on.

Tony Benn often used to do this three or four times before carrying on with his point, as in this example from the 1980s:

[Applause starts] “My resent – my resentment – my resentment about the - uh- [applause fades] my resentment about the exclusion of the House of Lords …”

Nearly 30 years later, he's still at it

"That's the [applause starts] real distinction that we have to face -- and it's not just -- actually - [applause stops] you can't even give Karl Marx the credit for that."

It might seem, of course that the Conservative Party’s annual conference is far too important and exposed a platform for Mr Cameron to start having a go at surfing the applause. But he has already been showing a natural inclination to do it, and taking it a small step further might not be any bigger risk than his daring departure from the lectern in 2005 –which yielded such a handsome dividend .

(VIDEO CLIPS of Benn, Sarkozy, Obama and Cameron can be seen HERE)

2009: CAMERON SURFS APPLAUSE TO WIN AN EARLY STANDING OVATION

A year later, here he is cranking out three rhetorical questions and a powerful contrast between the Tories and Labour - but, unlike in the example HERE, he doesn't back off as soon as the applause gets under way.

CAMERON:

Do you know what Labour called it?

“Callous.”

Excuse me?

Who has made the poorest poorer?

Who left youth unemployment higher?

Who made inequality greater?

No, not the wicked Tories

You, Labour: you are the ones who have done it to this society.

Don’t you dare lecture us on poverty.

You have failed and it (applause starts) falls the modern Conservative Party to help the poorest in our country today (applause continues and develops into standing ovation).

.

POSTSCRIPT

This year's party conference season was also the first time I'd ever seen Gordon Brown surfing applause, which won him a similarly positive response from media commentators - even though it was so extreme and 'out of character') that it arguably come across as rather contrived (discuss on which HERE):

Cameron's conference sound bite: 'compassionate Conservativism'

Immediately after David Cameron's leader's speech at the Tory Party conference this afternoon, Andrew Neil interviewed William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary and former party leader, on BBC's Daily Politics show.

Within a minute or two, Hague not only singled out the following line from Mr Cameron's speech, but managed to quote it twice - from which it's difficult not to conclude that this summary of 'compassionate Conservatism', expressed as a simple contrast, was the most important point that the party leadership wanted the wider public to take away from the speech:

"If you take responsibility we will reward you, and if you cannot, we will look after you."

Within the party, William Hague is regarded as 'deputy leader in all but name', and he was at the meeting where Mr Cameron was filmed working with colleagues on the speech (and put on YouTube by webcameronuk). No mention of this particular line in that rather staged piece of footage, but it's highly unlikely that it was merely coincidental that Hague mentioned it twice in quick succession at the first possible opportunity after the speech was over.

The complete sequence was actually a puzzle with a solution in the form of a contrast:

PUZZLE

Ask me what a Conservative government will stand for and it is this.

SOLUTION
[A] If you take responsibility we will reward you,
[B] and if you cannot, we will look after you.

I was wrong about Cameron looking at screens

A few days ago, I was recommending that David Cameron ought to do something to improve the way he uses the autocue/teleprompter, and stop looking at one screen for too long before looking towards the other one.

However, having watched his speech today, I realise that I've probably been wrong all along and that it's time to revise my opinion (and to apologise for my obsessive twittering on the subject).

This isn't because he'd resolved the problem, though it wasn't quite as noticeable as usual, but because, on closer examination, I'm pretty sure that he wasn't looking at any screens at all. In other words, he was was almost certainly relying on the paper script in front of him, had probably more or less memorised the whole thing in advance and only needed occasional glances down to keep himself on track.

If you watch the clip below, you'll not only see his eyes looking down at the lectern, but, when the camera pulls back to show us a wider angle, you won't see any sign at all of any autocue screens on poles (that are normally all too clearly visible). This was also true in some of the shots from behind Mr Cameron during the speech (examples of which I'll post as soon as I have them available).

What this suggests is that, like many speakers (including Margaret Thatcher and, I confess, myself), he suffers from what I've referred to in my books as 'skewed eye contact' - i.e. a natural and unconscious tendency to look at one side of the audience for far longer than at the other - an obvious disadvantage of which is that it can easily make a lot of people feel as though they're being left out.

I suppose that the reason for my mistake is that we've become so used to politicians using teleprompters that we assume they all do it, and that Mr Cameron's 'naturally' skewed eye contact gave the impression that he was doing it too.

However, although I may have been wrong about autocue screens being the cause of the problem, I still think that that he does have a problem that would be easy enough to solve - and that spreading his gaze more frequently in different directions would help him to become an even more effective orator than he already is.

Tory PR on the eve of Cameron's speech: gaffe or master stroke?

Was it an incredible gaffe or a spectacular PR coup for the Tories to reveal today that former army chief, General SIr Richard Dannatt, was being signed up for a position within the party as soon as he retires in November (HERE)?

Whatever the intention, not a single line from any of the speeches at todays party conference by shadow cabinet ministers Richerd Graylng, Michael Gove and Jeremy Hunt made it on to BBC Television's 10 o'clock News - the first twelve minutes of which (i.e. about 50% of the news bulletin) were entirely taken up with the Dannatt story.

Were the Tories, I wonder, delirious or despondent that the news of what had been said during the day's proceedings that was broadcast to to the mass television audience was 'nothing'? And were they equally happy to be seen to be recruiting a serving military leader because he's been critical of the way our civilian leaders (i.e. the elected government) have been handling the war effort.

PR leaks about Cameron's speech tomorrow
At the same time, the Tories have leaked some of the words (e.g. 'painful' and 'tough') that David Cameron will be using in his speech tomorrow.

And, according to Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, they've also given advance notice that he's got some biblical metaphors about climbing up mountains up his sleeve- which, though obviously borrowed from Martin Luther King and/or Barack Obama, have not so far been attributed to them in the advance press release.

George Osborne + Chris Grayling = Geoffrey Howe

Having seen shadow Chancellor George Osborne and shadow Home Secretary in action at the Tory Party Conference, an uninspiring voice from from the past started to echo in my mind: Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe.

The encouraging news for Messrs Osborne and Grayling is that, apart from his devastating resignation speech that marked the beginning of the end for Mrs Thatcher (HERE), he wasn't known for his electrifying oratory either and it didn't stop him from getting senior jobs in the cabinet.

Conference's luke warm response to taxing booze
I particularly enjoyed the delayed applause and below average 6 seconds of applause (for more on which see HERE & HERE) for some of Mr Grayling's plans for clamping down on the booze culture.

Whether this was the result of poor scripting, poor delivery or because the such down-market drinks didn't resonate with the audience is a matter for conjecture.

GRAYLING:
So let me set out for you in more detail our plan to introduce big increases in the tax on super strength alcohol.
We’ll increase the price of a four pack of super strength lager by £1.33
We will more than double tax on super strength cider.
And our planned increase on alcopops will raise the price of a large bottle by £1.50.
Not changes that will affect responsible drinkers.
Not changes that will affect the ordinary pint in the pubs.
And we’ll make sure for those of you- those parts of the country with traditional producers that we protect local traditional products
But we'll call time on the drinks that fuel antisocial behaviour.
(1 second silence)
(6 seconds of applause)

Does YouTube oppose the Tories and support UKIP?

While checking to see which of today’s speeches from the Conservative Party confeence had been posted on YouTube, I typed ‘tory party conference speech 2009’ into the search box.

As you'll see HERE, in the list of 22 videos on the first page of its response, eighteen were from the UKIP conference, one was of Gordon Brown, one of Nick Griffin (BNP) and one was a clip of Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics show.

The only Tory was chairman Eric Pickles with a trailer to the conference featuring clips from speeches by Margaret Thatcher.

Does this mean that political bias against the Conservatives and in favour of UKIP is built into way the YouTube search box works, or does it just reflect the number of times words like ‘tory’, ‘party’, ‘conference’ and ‘speech’ were mentioned by UKIP speakers at their conference?

Are there any geeks out there who can explain what it all means?

The barmy Tory backdrop disappears & reappears

The speaker a few moments ago at the Tory Party conference was the shadow minister for Culture, Media and Sport, Jeremy Hunt MP, who exposed something the designers of the barmy backdrop hadn't taken into account.

Hunt opted for the management guru style of delivery - i.e. walking about the platform pretending not to have a script (for more on which see HERE)

As a result, the leafy suburban backdrop kept disappearing as he walked from side to side, making the whole thing seem even barmier than yesterday - especially when camera angle changes revealed a row of delegates sitting on white armchairs suspended in the trees behind him.

What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop

The staging of Conservative Party conferences was transformed under Margaret Thatcher with the help of Harvey Thomas, who'd previously been involved in organising Billy Graham's crusades to the UK.

One innovation, later copied by other parties, was to seat other delegates out of sight so that they couldn't be seen behind the speaker. This had the advantage of reducing potential distractions and of preventing the mass audience from being able to monitor how colleagues were reacting to a speech

Before Labour followed suit, for example, sitting behind Neil Kinnock during his leader's speech were Dennis Skinner and Alice Mahon, chatting and shaking their heads as some of the things he was saying.

Then there as the classic Newsnight interview in which Peter Snow took Frances Pym to task for not applauding in the right places and/or vigorously enough (as can be seen HERE).

This year's Tory conference managers have come up with an innovation that I don't understand and have yet to hear explained. Yesterday, William Hague got up to speak in front of an anonymous townscape. Manchester? A typical Tory suburb? Middle England? Or just what is it supposed to symbolise?

Whatever the answer, it certainly got me (and probably anyone else who was watching too) wondering what they're trying to tell us - thereby distracting us from concentrating as closely as we should have been doing on what he was actually saying (which could, I suppose, be the whole point of it).



Today, when George Osborne appeared, the same background seemed to have moved in closer behind the podium, which has got me wondering whether, by the time David Cameron gives his leader's speech on Thursday, we'll see him perched on the roof of one of the houses.

P.S. Later on in the afternoon when it was Ken Clarke's turn, the backdrop had moved backwards again, closer to where it had been when William Hague was speaking. Is it symbolising some sort of pecking order we don't know about, is it random or will all be revealed by the end of the conference?

Surely it's time someone coached Cameron to use a teleprompter

At the risk of being accused of blogging about the same point too much, I was astonished to see a clip on the BBC TV's 10 o'clock News tonight of David Cameron speaking at the Tory Party conference in which he showed, yet again, that he's ignored the advice I gave him a year ago about spending far too much time looking at one of the autocue screens without looking in the other direction.

At one stage in today's excerpt, he spent 22 seconds looking to his right before managing to drag his head away to look at the other half of the audience on the other side of him.

It was also noticeable when he spoke at the Open University in May (HERE).

Nor is he alone, as Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown suffer from the same problem, as too did Margaret Thatcher (HERE).

What really flabbergasts me is that the advisors of politicians in such front-line positions don't seem to notice the problem or, if they do, they don't seem to think matters enough to do something about helping their bosses to solve it.

After all, reminding and coaching someone to remember to look from side to side more frequently is hardly the most difficult technique to get across, however busy and important their bosses might be.

What's more, there's plenty of time between now and his big speech on Thursday to fix it. And, needless to say, I shall be watching with interest.

Boris Johnson's funny bits

Today's heading is how ITN refers to the speech by the Mayor of London at the Conservative Party conference in their YouTube posting - and, as you can see from the full version (HERE), it only singles out some of the funny bits from 15 minutes that included some quite serious points not mentioned in this sequence.

Does it matter? Probably not, because if Boris Johnson wasn't such 'a character', he probably wouldn't have been elected to be Mayor of London in the first place.

Meanwhile, it's got me wondering whether I've seen any comparable 'characters' since I started taping and observing party conferencs 30 years ago.

So far, the best I've been able to come up so far are only 'possible' candidates, as they're not really in the same league on the comedy front: Rhodes Boyson (Conservative), Dennis Skinner (Labour) and Cyril Smith (Liberal).

I'd be fascinated to hear of any other nominations you might have.

Claptrap 6: An offer I couldn't refuse

This is the sixth in a series of posts marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Our Masters' Voicesand the televising of Claptrap by Granada Television.

Part 1: Claptrap - The Movie
Part 2: Eureka!
Part 3: News leaks out of the lecture theatre
Part 4: How to get a book published

Part 5: In the right places at the right times

The conference at which I'd had the unexpected chance to show some of the results of my forthcoming book to people from the media was only a week or two before the Chesterfield by-election that was scheduled for 1st March, 1984 - and where former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn, who'd just lost his seat in parliament, was standing as the Labour candidate.

A bird in the hand?

Peter Snow, one of the presenters of BBC 2's Newsnight, had been at the conference - after which, he was quick to phone me about going on the programme on the night of the by-election. I had, after all shown quite a few video clips of Mr Benn in action during my presentation, and had devoted several pages to his extraordinary speaking abilities in Our Master's Voices.

Although I was a regular viewer of Newsnight in those days, I knew that there weren't very many of us. Nor did five minutes on BBC 2 at dead of night seem the most promising way to promote the book - especially when someone from World in Action, with it's many millions more viewers, had told me not to sign up with anyone else until I'd spoken to him.

Over the next few days, there were more flattering calls from Newsnight urging me to agree to do an analysis of of Mr Benn - but still no word from Gus Macdonald of Granada. Had he really meant it, I wondered, or was it just conference ale and camaraderie that had been speaking? Should I commit to the BBC's bird in the hand or keep waiting for Granada's unspecified bird in the bush?

There was only one thing for it. Dreading another rejection to add to my collection from publishers (Claptrap 4), I steeled myself and dialed the number on Gus Macdonald's card.

Or a bird in the bush?

"Ah, I'm glad you've called" he said (much to my relief). "I've had an idea I'd like to talk to you about and was about to phone to suggest meeting for lunch."

Granada's London offices were in Soho, where I soon found myself at a Chinese restaurant being confronted with an offer that seemed far too good to be true.

"We'll find someone who's never made a speech before," he said, "then we'll film you coaching her on the stuff in your book and see what happens when she speaks at a party conference."

"But" - I'd never claimed it was a 'how to do it' book, had no idea whether the findings could be put into practiceand asked the obvious question: "What if it doesn't work?"

"Doesn't matter," he said "we'll just fade it out and roll the credits as she's climbing up to the podium. It would be a far more interesting way to tell the story of your research than all these boring Horizon programmes with professors droning on in front of rows of book shelves."

He'd even worked out that it would have to be someone from the SDP, because the new party had rules that would more or less ensure that a member would get to speak if they got their names down soon enough - whereas speakers at Labour Party conferences had to catch the eye of the chair and speakers at the Conservative Party Conference had to be vetted in advance. In any case, he knew the SDP president, Shirley Williams, and was pretty sure he'd be able to get her to call our Eliza Doolittle to speak.

And an Eliza, rather than and Edwin, Dolittle it would have to be, because this was the age of Margaret Thatcher and it was well known that she'd had a lot of help with speech-making and presentation.

To say I was taken aback by the idea would be an understatement. He was offering me the chance and the funding to carry out an experiment that I knew the Social Science Research Council would never have supported in a million years. Admittedly there was the rather large risk of putting my research on the line in front of 15 million viewers, rather than a few hundred readers of a learned journal. But if I'd been afraid of taking risks, I'd have had more sense than to go into conversation analysis in the first place.

Would a failed speech have been screened?

In retrospect, there are two reasons why I don't believe for a moment that Granada would have gone ahead and shown the programme if the experiment hadn't worked - however neat a way of telling the story it might have been.

One reason was that no contract had ever been written down or signed, which presumably meant that they could easily have ditched it and shown something else in the event of failure.

Another is that I learnt from Ann Brennan, after she'd won her standing ovation, that she too had asked the same question, "What if it doesn't work?", the night before she made the speech.

Gus's reply to her was rather different and more forthright than the one he'd given me six months earlier:

"It would just mean that the book's no b****y good."

Reading between the lines of 'Labour Vision'

In 1981, John Heritage and I video-recorded (on Betamax) the entire broadcast output of the three main party conferences, colleting a data base of about 500 speeches.

Today, the internet has not only made life much easier for rhetoric and oratory anoraks like me, but it can occasionally throw up some intriguing surprises, an example of which sprang out at me this morning.

Looking back on this year's Labour Party conference, I thought I'd have a look at some videos of speeches by likely candidates for the leadership when Gordon Brown (or the electorate) finally decides it's time for him to go.

The most obvious place to look was the 'Labour Vision' collection on YouTube, which is presumably put there by the party itself.

I've already mentioned the idea of 'noticeable absences' in relation to this year's speeches by Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson. But here, on 'Labour Vision' there's another very noticeable absence - of three likely candidates for the leadership when the time comes.

'Labour Vision' will let you watch this year's conference speeches by Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Harriet Harman, Jack Straw, Alan Johnson, Alistair Darling, Hilary Benn, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper.

But notable by their absence are the speeches by three of the younger generation of likely leadership contenders: Andy Burnham, David Miliband and Ed Balls.

This raises some interesting questions:

1. Why they are these three missing?
2. Who decided to omit them from the menu on 'Labour Vision'
3. Is someone trying to tell us that Miliband junior and Mrs Balls are ahead of Miliband senior and Mr Balls in the leadership stakes?
4. Or could it be that none of them are considered good enough communicators to risk broadcasting their speeches to a wider audience?

It would be nice if someone in the Labour Party could tell us, but I don't suppose they will.

OTHER CONFERENCE SEASON POSTS:

• What do Harriet Harman and Sybil Fawlty have in common?
• Gordon Brown on the morning after the night before
• Gordon Brown: the way he told them
• Brown surfs applause (briefly) before reverting to type
• Was it Mandelson’s self-deprecating humour that won him the day?
• If Mandelson has to struggle to win applause, what are the Labour Partly faithful saying?
• Why doesn’t anyone warn politicians about becoming autocue automatons?
• Gordon Brown goes walkabout (again)
• Methinks Labour doth protest/spin too much
• Clegg’s conference speech: ‘definitely OK, absolutely fine, without doubt not bad’
• Beware of mobile phones and 5-part lists
• Not the LibDem conference – BBC website news
• Gordon Brown tries out a 4 part list at the TUC
• Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak to the TUC
• The TUC , ‘where ‘fings aint wot they used to be’

What do Harriet Harman and Sybil Fawlty have in common?

One of the many memorable lines from Fawlty Towers was when Basil told Sybil that she ought to go on Mastermind, special subject "the bleeding obvious."

Until today, I'd always thought that Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party, had rather more about her that Mrs Fawlty.

Technically, it was hard to fault the way she brought this year's party conference to a close, deploying as she did, repetition and a 3-part list.

But take a closer look at the content of what she said:

Together we'll fight for those we represent.
Together we'll fight for a prosperous and fair Britain.
And most important, conference, together we'll fight to win.

And consider whether any politician of any party (other than perhaps the Monster Raving Loony Party) could have said the opposite:

Together we'll fight for those we don't represent.
Together we'll fight for an impoverished and unfair Britain.
And most important, conference, together we'll fight to lose.

What, I wonder, would Basil Fawlty have had to say to Harriet? "Special three subjects the bleeding obvious"?

The Hateful Daily Mail

This is the first time I've ever lifted a title verbatim from someone else's blog.

It's taken from one of the UKs top political bloggers, Iain Dale, who is rightly complaining to the Press Complaints Commission about an article by Ephraim Hardcastle in today's Daily Mail, which includes the following classic piece of Mail hatefulness:

Overtly gay Tory blogger Iain Dale has reached the final stage of parliamentary selection for Bracknell, telling PinkNews: 'I hope any PinkNews readers who live in Bracknell will come to the open primary on October 17 to select their new candidate.

You don't even have to be a Conservative to attend.'

Isn't it charming how homosexuals rally like-minded chaps to their cause?

You can read more about why Iain Dale is complaining and how to support him HERE. And, if you have red hair, or have any friends, relations or loved ones with red hair, take a deep breath before reading on.

Down with red heads - Mail exclusive

As for why I think it important enough to mention the Mail' at all, let alone its latest slur, it's to remind people that they've been peddling this kind of 'overtly' prejudicial journalism for decades.

One of the most scurrilous pieces I ever saw came from the pen of Ann Leslie, who's supposed to be so worthy and respectable that her services to journalism have been honoured by her elevation to Dame of the British Empire.

On the day before one of the general elections in which Neil Kinnock was leader of the Labour Party (1987 or 1992), the Mail published a two page spread with a perceptive article by Ms Leslie urging their readers not to vote Labour.

The headline summed it up with a warning never to trust a man with red hair (even though, at the risk of sounding baldist, Kinnock didn't have a lot of it left even then).

In fact, according to this erudite award-winning journalist, it would be too much of a risk ever to vote anyone with red hair into Downing Street. She developed her case in nauseating detail, listing every unfounded stereotype about the allegedly negative characteristics and temperament of 'red heads' that anyone has ever heard of - presenting them, of course, as established facts of life.

So, if it's any comfort to Iain Dale, he can at least breathe a sigh of relief that he doesn't have red hair.

Gordon Brown on the morning after the night before

If you didn't see this interview on Sky News, it's well worth watching.

I don't plan to comment on it, other than to say that I found it fascinating in all sorts of different ways - so fascinating, in fact, that I'm curious to know about the impressions others take from it.

OTHER CONFERENCE SEASON POSTS INCLUDE:

• Brown surfs applause (briefly) before reverting to type
• Was it Mandelson’s self-deprecating humour that won him the day?
• If Mandelson has to struggle to win applause, what are the Labour Partly faithful saying?
• Why doesn’t anyone warn politicians about becoming autocue automatons?
• Gordon Brown goes walkabout (again)
• Methinks Labour doth protest/spin too much
• Clegg’s conference speech: ‘definitely OK, absolutely fine, without doubt not bad’
• Beware of mobile phones and 5-part lists
• Not the LibDem conference – BBC website news
• Gordon Brown tries out a 4 part list at the TUC
• Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak to the TUC
• The TUC , ‘where ‘fings aint wot they used to be’

GORDON BROWN: The way he told them

It’s good to see The Guardian taking a leaf out of my book and having a go at doing (part of) my job for me!

Regular readers of this blog will know that I sometimes go through a speech looking at the rhetorical techniques the speaker used (e.g. HERE and HERE) and the amount of applause received – where the average burst is 8 ± 1 second (e.g. HERE).

So I was delighted to see the following piece on the Guardian website today, as all it left for me to do was to spot the rhetorical techniques and note whether the bursts of applause were average, below or above average (in red below).

(Links to other posts since the conference season began can be found at the bottom of the page).

GORDON BROWN: THE WAY HE TOLD THEM
Key moments in the prime minister's speech to the Labour party conference

(from today's Guardian website)

"We nationalised Northern Rock and took shares in British banks, and as a result not one British saver has lost a single penny. That was the change we chose. The change that benefits the hard working majority, not the privileged few." (CONTRAST)

Applause: 9.38 seconds (Average)

"The Conservative party were faced with the economic call of the century and they called it wrong."

Applause: 8.13 secs (Average)

"Call them middle class values, call them traditional working class values, call them family values, call them all of these; (1) these are the values of the mainstream majority; (2) the anchor of Britain's families, (3) the best instincts of the British people, (4) the soul of our party (5) and the mission of our government." (5 PART LIST)

Applause: 11.41 secs (Above average)

"For us the NHS has not been a 60-year mistake but a 60-year liberation." (CONTRAST)

Applause: 12.13 secs (Above average)

"In a crisis, what the British people want to know is that their government will not pass by on the other side but will be on their side." (CONTRAST with embedded biblical imagery)

Applause: 10.13 secs (Above average)

"Always a party of restless and relentless reformers, the new mission for new Labour is to realise our passion for fairness and responsibility in these new global times."

Applause: 5.69 secs (Below average)

"The best way finance can serve our country now is to help ensure that the inventions and innovations pioneered in Britain are developed and manufactured in Britain."

Applause: 7.56 secs (Average)

"And when people say, faced with the constraints of the recession, can you make progress towards a fairer and more responsible Britain, let us tell them we did, we can, and we will."

Applause: 7.25 secs (Average)

"I do think it's time to address a problem that for too long has gone unspoken, the number of children having children. For it cannot be right, for a girl of 16, to get pregnant, be given the keys to a council flat and be left on her own." (3 part list)

Applause: 14.72 secs (Above average)

"Whenever and wherever there is antisocial behaviour, we will be there to fight it."

Applause: 6.06 secs (Below average)

"Britain - the four home nations - each is unique, each with its own great contribution and we will never allow separatists or narrow nationalists in Scotland or in Wales to sever the common bonds that bring our country together as one."

Applause: 13.66 secs (Above average)

"Countries from every continent look to our NHS for inspiration. And this summer didn't we show them? We love our NHS." (PUZZLE + SOLUTION)

Applause: 9.28 secs (Average)

"Others may break their promises to the poorest, with Labour Britain never will." (CONTRAST)

Applause: 5.54 secs (Below average)

"Never again should any member of parliament be more interested in the value of their allowances than the values of their constituents." (CONTRAST)

Applause: 7.50 secs (Average)

"And so I say to the British people, the election to come will not be about my future - it's about your future. Your job. Your home. Your children's school. Your hospital. Your community. Your country." (CONTAST WITH LIST OF 7 AS SECOND PART!)

Applause: 11.88 secs (Above average)

"There is a difference between the parties. It's the difference between Conservatives who embrace pessimism and austerity and progressives like Labour who embrace prosperity and hope." (PUZZLE + 3 PARTED SOLUTION)

Applause: 11 secs (Above average)

"We love this country. And we have shown over the years that if you aim high you can lift not just yourself but your country - that there is nothing in life which is inevitable - it's about the change you choose." (CONTRAST?)

Applause: 10.56 secs (Above average)

"This is the change we choose; change that will benefit not just the few who can afford to pay, but the mainstream majority." (CONTRAST + ch-ch-m-m ALLITERATION)

Applause: 7.47 secs (Average)

OTHER CONFERENCE SEASON POSTS:

• Brown surfs applause (briefly) before reverting to type
• Was it Mandelson’s self-deprecating humour that won him the day?
• If Mandelson has to struggle to win applause, what are the Labour Partly faithful saying?
• Why doesn’t anyone warn politicians about becoming autocue automatons?
• Gordon Brown goes walkabout (again)
• Methinks Labour doth protest/spin too much
• Clegg’s conference speech: ‘definitely OK, absolutely fine, without doubt not bad’
• Beware of mobile phones and 5-part lists
• Not the LibDem conference – BBC website news
• Gordon Brown tries out a 4 part list at the TUC
• Why is Mr Brown bothering to speak to the TUC
• The TUC , ‘where ‘fings aint wot they used to be’

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