Was the Conservative candidate gagged after losing Eastleigh?
Maria Hutchings, defeated Conservative Party candidate in yesterday's Eastleigh by-election, has provided another remarkable video-clip for my collection.
What's so peculiar about it is the 'interviewees' determined refusal to say anything at all, accompanied by an unchangingly static facial expression.
Opening questions fishing for her view on what had gone wrong, such as "Why did you do so badly?" and "You came third in a two-horse race - what went wrong?" quickly gave way to her silence as the main focus of reporters' attention: "Why won't you say anything?"; "Have you been gagged?" and "This is unbelievable."
And there was indeed something very 'unbelievable' about it, as it's so rare for a politician to refrain from speaking to the media, even in the face of such difficult questions, that I too was left wondering whether Ms Hutchings had been 'gagged' by her party machine...
State of the Union Address, 2013: Surfing applause to bring about better gun control?
One of the things that impressed me when writing Our Masters' Voices (1984) was former Labour cabinet minister Tony Benn's technical ability to carry on speaking after his audience had started to applaud. It created the impression that he had not been attempting to trigger applause and that he was now having trouble making himself heard because what he'd just said had gone down so well with the audience that they couldn't wait any longer to show their approval.
It's a technique referred to in American English as 'surfing appplause', a phrase that sums it up so well that I wish I'd known it when I first started writing about it. When done well, the audience reaction comes across as unequivocally positive, with speaker and listeners sounding as though they are on exactly the same wavelength.
It was therefore fascinating to see where President Obama took to surfing the applause during this year's State of the Union address - at the point when he starts to identify groups of people and individuals who have suffered from gun violence and who "deserve a vote".
Although it would be nice to think that the president's technical skill at rhetoric and oratory might be enough to get the job of gun control done, I fear that this will never happen - and will be thwarted by the peculiar (and peculiarly) American obsession with 'the right to bear arms'...
Other posts on surfing applause
Waterbottle gate: a reminder about drinking and speaking from Senator Marco Rubio
Since Senator Marco Rubio, an early favourite for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination according to some newspapers responded to President Obama's State of the Union address a few hours ago, he's attracted a good deal of flack on Twitter for the way he grasped for a bottle of water during his speech (about 23 seconds into the above) - in a sequence that's apparently going viral...
Yet all of us who do any public speaking at all know that a glass (rather than a bottle) of water close at hand (rather than a few feet away and nearly out of reach) is an essential part of your backup equipment.
The awkward, even shifty, way in which Rubio reached for his water may not have been very elegant or well-timed. But it came nowhere close to the disaster I saw some years ago at a Labour Party annual conference.
The speaker was making a long and boring speech about a long and boring composite motion that he was proposing. A cutaway shot of the audience showed that some were reading newspapers, some were audibly chatting to each other and very few were paying attention.
So when the speaker paused for a drink of water, the audience must have thought he'd finished and promptly started clapping.
But he hadn't finished and thanked them for the applause - before droning on for several more minutes.
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