Max Atkinson's Blog

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).

Clinton, Palin and the legacy of Margaret Thatcher

In the last few blog entries on Margaret Thatcher, I've been suggesting that she had found a solution to the professional woman’s problem of being damned if they behave like a man and damned if they behave like a woman – which involved being tough and decisive in her actions while being uncompromisingly female in her external appearance – and that this was summed up by the nickname the 'Iron Lady’. Although first used by the Soviet media, it was something that Mrs Thatcher was quick to take on board and use to her own advantage.

Whether or not Sarah Palin and her advisors were aware of this when she juxtaposed toughness and femininity by dubbing herself a ‘pit bull with lipstick’, I do not know. But, judging from news reports of Republican campaign expenditure on her wardrobe, and widespread coverage of her enjoyment of rugged outdoor pursuits like hunting and shooting, it looks as though she or her advisors had taken on board Margaret Thatcher’s lesson about combining unequivocal femininity with toughness.

However, leaks from Hillary Clinton’s aides (and casual observation of her preference for trousers/pants over skirts/dresses) suggest that they hadn’t quite got the point about Mrs Thatchers success in image mangement.

On 12th August 2008, the following headline appeared in the Daily Telegraph (click here for full story).

HILLARY CLINTON'S FAILED STRATEGY INSPIRED BY MARGARET THATCHER
'Hillary Clinton's flawed strategy for winning the White House was rooted in her chief strategist's admiration for Margaret Thatcher as the "best role model" for her, according to a leaked campaign memorandum.'

My immediate reaction on reading this was to wonder whether these 'strategists' or Mrs Clinton herself had actually understood the key components of the ‘role model’ so successfully established by Mrs Thatcher more than 30 years ago . What followed suggested that the author of the leaked document had not understood it at all, and that he’d made the mistake of concentrating exclusively on the mature Thatcher of later years (in her second and third terms in office) rather than on the younger Thatcher who had won her way to the top in the first place. The Telegraph article continued:

"We are more Thatcher than anyone else - top of the university, a high achiever throughout life, a lawyer who could absorb and analyse problems, "Mark Penn wrote to the former First Lady in a "launch strategy" document in December 2006.

The Democratic candidate, he argued, had to show the kind of decisiveness the former British prime minister had shown when she was first elected in 1979 - "her mantra was opportunity, renewal, strength and choice" - and avoid the temptation to try to be loved.

"Margaret Thatcher was the longest serving Prime Minister in British history, serving far longer than Winston Churchill. She represents the most successful elected woman leader in this century - and the adjectives that were used about her (Iron Lady) were not of good humour or warmth, they were of smart, tough leadership."

The memo was part of a trove of internal Clinton campaign documents leaked to the Atlantic Monthly magazine that reveal a campaign that was fatally undermined by internal dissension, an incoherent strategy and - ironically, given the Thatcher comparison - Senator Clinton's hesitancy and failure to take decisions.

But what about the other half of the story?
The flaw in Penn’s analysis was to concentrate only on those components of Thatcher’s ‘role model’ that had insulated her from being damned for behaving like a woman (e.g. ‘decisiveness’, ‘strength’ and ‘toughness’) to the exclusion of those that had insulated her from being damned for being unfeminine (e.g. carefully coiffured hair, dental capping, make-up, dresses – yes, dresses, not trouser/pant-suits, à la Hillary Clinton).

How could Penn, Clinton or anyone else who bought into this ‘analysis’ have missed such an obvious point as Thatcher’s uncompromising femininity – even to the extent of making much of the ‘tough’ implications of the first word in the ‘Iron Lady’ nickname while completely ignoring the essentially female connotations of the second word?

The age factor?
At the risk of sounding ‘ageist’, the most likely explanation of this extraordinary gaffe is that it did have to do with age, both of the advisor and of his client: in 2008, Mrs Clinton was ten years older than Mrs Thatcher was after she'd already spent six years as prime minister (and was only two years away from winning her third general election).

And unless Mr Penn, as a 21 year old, took far more interest in European politics than most Americans I know, it seems highly unlikely that he would even have noticed when a rather good-looking and well turned-out 50 year old English woman won the Conservative Party leadership campaign in 1975 (still four years away from making it to the top job). But by the time he became a strategist/consultant, all he could see was a much older woman who was, by then, more famous for her toughness than for her femininity.

Thatcher and Palin?

As for Mrs Palin, her record in Miss Alaska competitions, her willingness to wear skirts and dresses and to boast about being a 'hockey Mom' suggest that, like Mrs Thatcher, she had no qualms about combining uncompromising femininity with the toughness associated with her outdoor sporting pursuits.

However, from a distance of 6,000+ miles away, and on the basis of cursory research into her education and career history, I have to say that her background seems to be a bit lacking in the impeccable credentials of Margaret Thatcher, who graduated from a top university (Oxford) and had worked as a research chemist and tax lawyer before winning a seat in the House of Commons and embarking on a career in politics.

RELATED POSTS:

Margaret Thatcher and the evolution of charismatic woman: PART III The education of a female orator

Although Mrs Thatcher took the business of public speaking very seriously after becoming leader of the Conservative Party (see parts I & II), it’s important to remember that she had already come a very long way in the years before she got there and must have found a way of surviving in the male-dominated world of politics long before Ronald Millar, Gordon Reece or Saatchi and Saatchi came on the scene. In this connection, her biography shows that, from a very early age, the former Margaret Roberts had far more opportunities than most English girls of her generation to become accustomed with being treated on equal terms with men.

Mrs Thatcher's father was very active both as a local town councillor in Grantham, Lincolnshire, and as a Methodist lay preacher. According to her biographers, the young Margaret was not just exposed throughout her childhood to the political discussions that regularly took place in the Roberts household and across the counter of their grocery shop, but was also actively encouraged by her father to take part in them.

At the same time, she was listening to weekly Sunday sermons in the local Methodist church and, more occasionally, heard speeches by national politicians who were visiting the town. That she showed early promise in making the most of these experiences is shown by the fact that, at the age of nine, she won a poetry-reading competition at a local drama festival. It’s also reported that such talents continued to blossom while she was a pupil at Kesteven and Grantham Girls' School:

‘She was a studious girl, but enjoyed the dramatic society, which made her at one time consider becoming an actress, and also question and answer sessions at the end of visitors' lectures, as long as the subject was current affairs. She is well remembered by a girl in the year above her, Margaret Goodrich, for cross-questioning Bernard Newman, the expert on spying, with a confidence not normally expected from such a young girl.’ (Wapshott and Brock, Thatcher, pp. 34-5)

For her higher education, the future prime minister could hardly have gone to a university more dominated by men and male traditions than the Oxford of the 1940s. Nor could she have chosen a subject studied by fewer women or by fewer aspiring politicians than chemistry - Mrs Thatcher is not just the first woman, but also the first, and so far only, science graduate, to have become prime minister of the UK.

At the same time, part of the experience of living in an all women's college for three years involved taking it for granted that female academics were perfectly capable of performing on equal terms with men. Her chemistry tutor at Somerville was Dorothy Hodgkin, who subsequently went on to win a Nobel prize. During this period she also kept up an active interest in politics, and became president of the University Conservative Association, a post that brought her into direct contact with many of the then leading national politicians, as well as her own student contemporaries who were later to achieve cabinet rank, including Tony Benn, Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle.

In her subsequent careers, first as an industrial research chemist and later as a tax barrister, Mrs Thatcher continued to live and work on equal terms with men in professions where women were still extremely under-represented. So, by the time she won a seat in parliament, she had already accumulated two decades of experience at succeeding in male-dominated environments. Even allowing for the inevitable tendency of biographers (and obituary- writers) to select facts from a life story which fit in with whatever the subject eventually became, it would seem that Mrs Thatcher underwent a lengthy and highly relevant apprenticeship, similar to that recommended by the classical Greek and Roman writers on the education of male orators.

As can be seen from her speeches, there is no doubt of her ability to deploy the full range of rhetorical techniques, and to do so in such a way that her essential femininity was never seriously called into question.

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