Ed Miliband's tour de force

It's not often that a party leader's conference speech gets as widespread a thumbs-up as Ed Miliband enjoyed yesterday - even though what seems to have impressed the media most is his new-found ability to speak so fluently (and for so long) without any apparent reference to a script.

Could it be, I began to wonder, that our broadcast media are themselves so dependent on scripts and teleprompters that they're all too easily impressed by a style of speaking that they rather wish they could master for themselves?

Camaronesque?
Or did David Cameron really set a new standard when he won his party leadership by speaking without notes at a 'beauty parade' in 2005, underlining the power of an unscripted conference speech two years later by deterring Gordon Brown from holding a general election at a time when Labour would almost certainly have won?

Subsequent attempts by others, like Nick Clegg and Gordon Brown, to emulate David Cameron's skill at speaking without a script have not met with anything like as favourable a media response as Ed Miliband attracted yesterday.

Scriptlessness or better than expected?
It's not clear to me whether this was mainly the result of scriptlessness, a more relaxed delivery than usual or, perhaps most likely (?) because Miliband's previous performances had set such low media expectations.

The trouble now is that he runs the risk, if he reverts to using scripts again, of being denounced for not speaking from the heart and/or having employed someone else to write his speeches for him.

Other quibbles
Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm still not convinced by this walkabout management guru style of delivery for political speeches. Other quibbles include:

• Glum-looking backdrop: I still don't see the point of having part of the audience behind the speaker. Although reasonably well-behaved, this particular group looked very glum for much of the time and were, on occasions,  rather slow to join in the applause. 
• Too youthful a sample*: Some viewers (e.g. me) were quite shocked by how very young a sample of voters they represented, with no one much over 45 anywhere to be seen among those behind him.
• Hands: Finally, if you're going to wander about the stage, what to do with your hands and how to respond to applause can pose problems for a speaker. On the whole. Mr Miliband coped quite well on both these fronts. However, he might like to note that there were some on Twitter who took exception to the fact that he spoke for quite long periods with one hand in his pocket. If it's any comfort to him, the complainants probably went to a public school where you weren't allowed to put your hands in your pockets until you reached the sixth form...

P.S. Thanks to Simon Atkinson of IpsosMORI for pointing out via Twitter (@SimonMAtkinson) that  53% of electors are aged 45+!! (his exclamation marks). Perhaps he or one of his colleagues should alert the Labour Party (or whoever selects their backdrop audiences) to this important fact...

Does Ed Milband have anything to gain by banging on about which school he went to?

Call me old fashioned, but I really don't get this "I went to an even more ordinary school than you did" stuff that we're being promised from the leader of the Labour Party in his speech later today.

Nor do I get why he's apparently going to tell us (yet again) the story of his parents' flight from the Nazis and their successful upwardly mobile life in Britain.

The point, Mr Miliband, is that none of us has any control over who our parents were, or where they came from or which school they decided to send us to when we were children - whether our surname happens to be Cameron, Clegg or Miliband.

Nor, dare I say it, is your attempt to affiliate with the ordinary very convincing when the school in question turns out to be Haverstock Comprehensive, which strikes me (who went to a prep school in Doncaster) as being rather close to a posh suburb called 'Hampstead'.

The embourgeoisment of the Labour Party may have become a source of embarrassment to all you MPs who've been parachuted into safe Northern seats. But is all this "more ordinary than thou" a sensible way to address the problem?

Related posts

• Vowels, voters and the voice of authenticity: the case for Andy Burnham
• Labour leadership" "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the most bourgeois of us all?"

Ed Balls may be a better speaker than he was, but...

James Forsyth's assessment of Ed Balls as "a vastly improved platform speaker" (Spectator) was quite widely echoed by other journalists today on Twitter.

Michael Crick of Channel 4 News (@MichaelLCrick) told us that Mr Balls had "rehearsed his speech in his hotel room with an ironing board" - adding, rather unkindly: "which may explain why, in the end, it was a bit flat."

Looking on a brighter side, I think it's quite impressive these days to hear that our politicians take the trouble to rehearse their speeches at all, especially when they've taken the apparently daring decision to use a hard copy script rather than read from an Autocue.

But there were two things about this particular speech that puzzled me:

• First, quite a few tweets on Twitter noticed and commented on the Labour Party's unexplained decision to abandon a red background completely in favour of making it look as though they'd stolen the Conservative's erstwhile monopoly on blue.

• Second, although I can see why today's Labour hierarchy prefer saying "conference" to "comrades" (as in the past) was it really necessary for Mr Balls to repeat the word 33 times during his speech - especially when both words draw attention to the fact that he has trouble saying his 'r's and pronounces the words as "confwence" and 'comwades"? 

For me, at least, I found the excessive, and in my view pointless, repetition of "confwence" so distracting and annoying that I stopped watching the speech when he was only about half way through - which is presumably not what he hopes for from his audiences.

A generous audience for Clegg - but why on earth draw attention to it?

In previous years, I've criticised Nick Clegg (and/or those advising him) for the decision to go for the management guru stye of delivery in his leader's speech - i.e. wandering around the stage pretending that he's not using a teleprompter.

So the big plus this year was to see the Deputy Prime Minister looking rather more statesmanlike than usual by the simple device of staying firmly at the lectern.

But there's another important lesson he still has to learn: if a particular line goes down well with your audience, don't comment on it or otherwise draw attention to it.

This particular joke (scroll in about 20 seconds) was, perhaps predictably, the first sound bite from the speech to be tweeted by BBC television's @daily_politics shoe - and will probably make it on to some of tonight's prime-time news programmes.

It was so successful that it triggered a massive 23 seconds of applause (i.e. 15 seconds more than the standard 8 seconds burst).

But surely it's far better to leave the audience to draw their own (positive) conclusions about what they've just seen and heard than to comment on the difference between what you'd expected and what had happened. All that achieves is to highlight the scripted calculated nature of the line in question - and perhaps also gives away that there'd been a good deal of discussion about it beforehand with your aides:

"I thought you'd groan rather than clap at that one, but anyway [slight laughter] what a generous audience."

It reminded me of a line Mrs Thatcher once used in the early 1980s, when she based her commendation of her foreign secretary, Lord Carrington, on a television beer advertisement of the day: "Yes, he really is the peer that reaches parts thaat other peers can't reach."

This prompted much laughter and applause, during which she could be seen (and just heard) saying "Oh, it did work, then..."

In this particular case, Nick Clegg's good luck is that, in order to include the unfortunate line, the the television news shows would have to play the whole 23 seconds of applause that comes before it - so it's unlikely to be seen by anyone other than anoraks like me (and/or readers of blogs like this one).

Is Vince Cable (BA Cambridge, PhD Glasgow) really a pleb?

Unlike his audience at the Lib Dem conference, I'm not at all convinced that Vince Cable's BA from Cambridge and PhD from Glasgow qualifies him as a 'pleb'.

Nor do I think he would have got away with his attempt to affiliate with the working class if he didn't still have the remains of a Yorkshire accent...

A neat contrast wins applause for Obama's talk show point about Romney

I may have been rather critical of President Obama's rather uninspiring (for him) acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, but was rather more impressed by his performance on the David Letterman Show last night, prompting as it did an interruptive burst of applause (scroll in 40 seconds) - just after he'd used a nice simple contrast:

"My expectation is that, if you want to be President, 
"you got to work for everyone, not just for some,  [APPLAUSE STARTS] 
"and thee uh--"[APPLAUSE  CONTINUES]

As noted elsewhere on this blog (and in my books), the contrast is one of the most important rhetorical devices for triggering applause in political speeches. And, as is evident from this example, it can work in the same way in other settings too (e.g. TV interviews).

Does Mitt Romney's mouth move faster than his brain?

I've not studied Mitt Romney's style of speaking in much detail, but there may be a clue in his latest gaffe (above) as to why I'd felt there was something a bit odd about him.

It's the sheer speed at which he speaks.

Speeches by effective public speakers are delivered at about 120 words per minute, which is much slower than the 180 words per minute found in conversations between native speakers of English (see my books).

But in the sequence that got him into so much trouble, Mr Romney manages about 200 words per minute - i.e. 20 words per minute quicker than conversation.

Apart from the fact that this is abnormally fast for a conversation (let alone a speech) it raises two intriguing quetions:

1. Is he speaking too quickly for his brain to be able to produce carefully considered and/or 'elegantly stated' opinions?
2. How, in American culture, is 'fast-speaking' likely to be regarded by the wider public?

For what it's worth, to my British ears, 'fast-speaking' tends to have mainly negative connotations...