B- for the Duchess of Cambridge's second speech (and/or her PR team)

After the Duchess of Cambridge's first speech (HERE), one of the comments on YouTube said: "Extremely annoying how she reads the script every 2 seconds, that was most likely written by her PR team."

But the overall consensus was that, for a first effort, it wasn't too bad at all.

Second effort though this one may have been, the rather carping comment above seems even more appropriate than last time - or at least raised a number of questions.

• Had she rehearsed the speech and, if so, how many times?
• How was the speech laid out on the two pages she was using?
• Why hadn't the height of the microphone been fixed before she started to speak?
• Had the sign in the background been properly secured?
• Why was there a gap on the left of the sign that allowed a police woman disguised as Princess Anne (and various other people) to peer out an distract the wider audience?

Or, to put it more bluntly, with the resources available to the royal households, why on earth don't they bother to get the basics right>

A silent Hillsborough apology from The Sun's current editor

Last night's TV coverage of the Hillsborough disaster report included what looked like a rather amateurish self-filmed statement by Dominic Mohan, the current editor of The Sun.

Curious to see it again, I looked it out on YouTube, but all that was there was this silent version of the said statement, raising the question of whether it could by any chance have happened by accident...

With sound
Since posting the above, I've tracked down the complete version on The Sun website - where the 'amateurish self-filmed' appearance of the above is explained: it was produced by The Sun for posting on their own website.

However, it still sounds as though it were hastily scripted or poorly rehearsed - or both. I'm also not very impressed by the fact that the Sun's current editor still seems to be trying to pass the buck to the South Yorkshire Police:

A classic of barnstorming speechifying from Jennifer Granholm, former governor of Michigan

Compared with some of the speeches he made in the run-up to the last presidential election, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at last week's Democratic Convention deserved little more than a B-.

I know this because BBC World got me to watch the whole thing and make a few comments on it the morning after he made it (and "few" was the operative word).

But there had been some quite startling speeches that were never seen on this side of the Atlantic, one of which was brought to my attention by my old friend John Heritage of UCLA, who's still keeping an eye on speeches and referred to this one as "a small classic of truly barnstorming speechifying!"