Lord Mandelspin strikes again

The bloggers' verdict on this morning's interview of Peter Mandelson by Andrew Marr seems to be that the former ran rings around the latter (e.g. HERE).

But it's hardly surprising given that the only proper job Mandelson had before he went into politics was as a back room boy on LWT's Weekend World for Brian Walden, one of the finest interviewers ever seen on British television.

As for whether or not it's a good idea to allow spin doctors to migrate from behind the scenes to centre stage is arguably much more debatable than Gordon Brown seems to think. Or perhaps the P.M. is the only person in the country who has forgotten the troubles associated with his new deputy's various departures from Blair governments.

My problem, whenever I see Lord Mandelson on the screen, is that it always reminds me of Rory Bremner's brilliant impersonations of him, and I'd be very surprised if I'm the only viewer who can't get this image out of my head.

Brown does a better job than Obama at the 65th anniversary of D-Day

In case anyone thinks that I only ever post negative comments about Gordon Brown (not so, as you can see HERE and HERE), I do agree with today’s positive assessment of his D-Day performance by Clark Judge, a former Reagan speechwriter: 

'Today, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was by far the most eloquent and most appropriate, at least to this American’s ear.  More purely than the others, he captured the transcendent significance of the moment — the legacy of sacrifice for an enduring cause that ennobled and continues to ennoble the world.  At stake was something larger than one country, one moment, one fight, something beyond time and place, something on which all of time would turn, and he captured that.

'The others were good, though each with an ever so slightly bemusing touch of the parochial.  Was a ceremony marking heroic exertions made in alliance with Britain really the right occasion for a US president to invoke Lexington and Concord?  And didn’t the soldiers of all the countries engaged that day, not just Canadians (the only focus of the Canadian PM’s account of the post-war world), return home to build, not just a better country, but a better world?  And didn’t the men who hit the beaches in 1944 fight for something beyond national vengeance and personal survival, though from the repeated references in the French president’s remarks you might have thought otherwise'  (see Podium Pundits for fuller version).

President Obama came nowhere near matching Ronald Reagan’s masterpiece on the 40^th anniversary of D-Day (HERE), and, as Clark Judge notes, the references to battles in the American war of independence did seem a bit barmy in the presence of a distinguished British contingent that included a direct descendent (Prince Charles) of the king against whom they were rebelling.

How Caroline Flint gave the game away about expecting a post in the cabinet

It’s hardly surprising that people believe that Caroline Flint was expecting a seat in the cabinet when she expressed loyalty to Gordon Brown the day before she resigned.  

Have a look at the interview below, where, after a minute or two, you can hear her saying: “.. and serving, if he wants me to, in Gordon Brown’s c-uhh-government.”  

Given the context of the discussion, it's difficult to think of any word beginning with a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ other than ‘cabinet’ that she so quickly aborted and corrected to "government".

The trouble with slips like this is that, as the late Harvey Sacks, one of the founders of conversation analysis, used to say “Once it’s out, it’s anyone’s.” 

The interview is interesting in other ways too, as it includes quite a lot of breaches of one of the most basic conversational rules of all, namely 'one speaker speaks at a time' (for more on which, see HERE). 

You can also see an interesting first hand report on the interview HERE from Iain Dale, one of the interviewees.

Gordon Brown’s honesty about the death of New Labour

The Prime Minister’s press conference yesterday has aroused much media comment about the gap between his declaration of paternally derived honesty and the apparent lack of it in his denial that he’d ever intended to sack the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  

But one thing that did come across as much more honest than perhaps even he realises, was his further confirmation that he has abandoned the language of New Labour. 

Five years ago, when Brown and his cronies were briefing away about getting rid of Tony Blair, I wrote a piece (HERE) suggesting they were mistaken, and included the line ‘Blair and Brown were co-architects of New Labour, even though Brown now seems obsessed with deleting the phrase from his vocabulary.'

Nor was it just the phrase ‘New Labour’ that Brown stopped using all those years ago. Another is the phrase ‘public investment’. 

Shortly after Tony Blair’s second election victory, I met one of his closest aides at a conference.  As a student of language and communication, I had been intrigued by the way in which he and everyone else in the party had, since the birth of ‘New Labour’, only talked about ‘public investment’, ‘investment’ in health, education, social services, etc.,  but never mentioned the once more usual term ‘public expenditure’.

So I asked him if this preference for the word ‘investment’ was a deliberate ploy because it sounded more respectable and less worrying than words like ‘spending’ and ‘expenditure’ – to which he replied “Of course it is”. 

But under Gordan Brown this key term in the original language of ‘New Labour’ has disappeared as completely as the phrase ‘New Labour’ itself. 

As you can see in the following extracts from Mr Brown’s press conference yesterday, he is as relaxed in talking about public ‘expenditure’ as he is in boasting about it as an unquestionable virtue. 

On this, at least, his performance arguably displayed a refreshing degree of honesty .

D-Day 65th Anniversary (2): a reminder for Sarkozy and a challenge for Obama

Prompted by the news that the Queen hadn't been invited to today’s 65^th anniversary commemoration of D-Day, I recently posted a clip from Ronald Reagan’s moving speech at Pointe du Hoc on the 40^th anniversary in 1984. 

Here is an audio version of the whole speech that serves as the soundtrack to a neatly edited collection of pictures and film footage from D Day. 

I don’t know if President Sarkozy’s English is up to understanding one of Ronald Reagan's finest speeches, but it wouldn’t do him any harm just to watch the visual reminders of the Normandy landings. Had he done so a few weeks ago, he might have shown a bit more diplomacy when it came to making the arrangements for today. 

Meanwhile, the challenge for President Obama is how do you follow the great communicator when he was right at the top of his game?

(See also D-Day 65th Anniversary (1).