Good news from the BBC's revamped website: Mandelson embedded!

I've just noticed that there's a very welcome innovation on the revamped BBC website that brings it into line with YouTube and other sites from which you can embed video clips in blog posts.

This is going to make life much easier for those of us who like to be able to post examples illustrating whatever it is we're blogging about.

To celebrate, what better way than to embed the first clip on which I noticed that this is now possible, namely an interview in which Lord Mandelson explains (?) why his loyalty to the Labour Party is unaffected by washing so much dirty linen in public via his memoirs and their current serialisation in The Times:



So it was the cash!

Followers of Twitter may have noticed that I put out some tweets the other day asking what had motivated Mandelson to wash so much dirty linen in public at such a difficult time for a party that's just lost an election and is still engaged in electing a new leader:

• To put the record straight?
• To assert his own importance in the history of New Labour?
• Or to collect as much cash as possible while the going's good?

All the replies I received suggested people thought it was the third of thes - and two moments of disarming honesty in the above confirm that a desire to cash in was indeed at the heart of his motivation:

1. "If I'd done that (i.e. written a 'normal ordinary political memoir') not only would people probably not have bought it or read it, but you'd be here asking why weren't you more honest..." (1.10 minutes in)

2. ".. how topical should you be? Should you wait for two years or more by which time everyone's lost interest in what you have to say ... so in my view better to get it out while it's fresh..." (2.14 minutes in).

In another interview in The Guardian, Mandelson is just as open about the importance of his 'warts and all' approach for finding a publisher and selling a few books:

But has he not betrayed confidences for personal gain ? "It's a memoir. I did not want a nondescript work that glossed over everything. I cannot tell a story about myself without telling a story about Tony and Gordon. We were so intertwined. You either don't tell that story at all or you tell it truthfully, warts and all; you cannot be half-pregnant in a situation like this.

"The days of anodyne memoirs where everything is hushed up and swept under the carpet for 30 years are long gone. You would not find a publisher and you would not find anyone to buy it, and if anyone was unlucky enough to buy it they would be asleep."

Slight exaggeration?

".. I've been a member of the party all my life .." (1.30 minutes in).

Lord Mandelson was born on 21 October 1953 - but I'll gladly leave it to other anoraks to check out whether the Labour Party has any record of his parents signing him up as a member on that particular date.

Fidel Castro's oratory

A few days ago, when posting comments on the Queen's recent 'politically neutral' speech to the United Nations, I mentioned the fact that UN members have heard some pretty controversial speeches from other heads of state.

Today's news that Fidel Castro has given his first TV interview since his 'retirement' reminded me that he was one of them.

It also reminded me of a rather obvious point I'd made in a heading above a picture of the young Castro in my book Our Masters' Voices (1984, p. 4):

'Skillful public speaking can be readily recognized even in those whose politics we may disagree with, and whose languages we do not understand.'

What fascinated me then - and still does - is the fact that we don't have to be able to understand Spanish or German to be able to see and hear that speakers like Castro and Hitler were highly effective orators.

In this first clip, we don't actually get to hear anything of what he says, but the ancient newsreel does provide a vivid reminder of the kind of mass rallies the Cuban leader used to address after coming to power - not to mention his PR skills in allowing himself to be filmed playing baseball.



In this next one, we do get to see and hear him in action, this time at the United Nations - where his style of delivery is very different from that exhibited by the Queen last week.

If, like me, you don't understand a word of what he's saying, a useful exercise is to watch, listen and take note of what it is about the way he's speaking that leaves you in no doubt that this is a passionately delivered speech that certainly isn't 'politically neutral':

Bad manners from Blatter as he bags limelight to present the World Cup

At the 1966 World Cup Final, the head of state of the host country presented the trophy to the winning captain (above).

But FIFA boss Sepp Blatter appears to be so keen on taking centre stage for himself that he virtually shoulder-charged South Africa's President Zuma out of the way to thrust the World Cup into the hands of the Spanish team last night - with the local head of state only being allowed to touch the side of the cup as it was handed over (below).

Blatter had apparently been putting pressure on 92 year-old Nelson Mandela to present the cup, in spite of his age, his frailty and the fact that he's grieving the loss of a close family member. So, if Mr Mandela had agreed to do it, would Blatter also have shoulder-charged him out of the way?

And what would we have thought if one of his FIFA predecessors had treated the Queen in the same way back in 1966?

In both cases, I'd have thought much the same as I thought about the way he treated President Zuma last night, namely that it was the height of bad manners.

See what you think:

P.S. The embedded video from YouTube that was originally posted here suddenly became unavailable. Could it be, I wonder, that FIFA was so embarrassed by Blatter's behavior that they removed it? Luckily, I'd transferred it to a blog-friendly format that means it can still be seen here.