It was filmed and produced by Tim Clague, who as Brian rightly says 'has communicated brilliantly what we all stand for.'
UK Speechwriters' Guild annual conference video
It was filmed and produced by Tim Clague, who as Brian rightly says 'has communicated brilliantly what we all stand for.'
Think twice before you read or write
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).
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)?
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?
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?
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?
5. And why hadn't he mentioned any of my books on all this, or at least supplied a link to my blog?
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’
• 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’