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.