The Queen's Speech: an exception that proves the ruler


(I've just noticed that a link from today's earlier blog post wasn't working, so the original from five years ago is reposted here).

Here's something at the other end of the scale from previous blogs about Barack Obama's brilliance at oratory.

At the State Opening of Parliament on 3rd December, the Queen, as she does every year, will be reading out her government's legislative plans for the months ahead. Most commentators will be listening to the Speech to find out what Gordon Brown is going to be putting on the statute book in 2009.

How not to speak inspiringly
But you can also listen to it as a model of how not to give an inspiring speech.

Public speaking at its best depends both on the language used to package the key messages and the way it is delivered. Using rhetoric, maintaining eye contact with the audience, pausing regularly and in particular places, stressing certain words and changing intonation are all essential ingredients in the cocktail for conveying passion and inspiring an audience. This is why it is so easy to ‘dehumanise’ the speech of Daleks and other talking robots by the simple device of stripping out any hint of intonational variation and have them speak in a flat, regular and monotonous tone of voice.

When it comes to sounding unenthusiastic and uninterested in inspiring an audience, the Queen’s Speech is an example with few serious competitors. She has no qualms about being seen to be wearing spectacles, which underline the fact that she is reading carefully from the script she holds so obviously in front of her. Nor is she in the least bit inhibited about fixing her eyes on the text rather than the audience. Then, as she enunciates the sentences, her tone is so disinterested as to make it abundantly clear that she is merely reciting words written by someone else and about which she has no personal feelings or opinions whatsoever.

This is, of course, how it has to be in a constitutional monarchy, where the head of state has to be publicly seen and heard as obsessively neutral about the policies of whatever political party happens to have ended up in power. The Queen knows, just as everyone else knows, that showing enthusiasm, or lack of it, about the law-making plans of her government would lead to a serious crisis that would be more than her job is worth. So, even when announcing plans to ban hunting with hounds, she managed not to convey the slightest hint of disappointment or irritation that a favorite pastime of her immediate family was about to be outlawed.

The Queen’s Speech is therefore an interesting exception to the normal rules of effective public speaking, and her whole approach to is a fine example of how to deal with those rare occasions when you have to conceal what you really feel about the things you are talking about. Another master of this was Mr McGregor, an official spokesman for the foreign office during the Falklands war, who made regular appearances of on television reading out progress reports in a flat, deadpan monotone – presumably because a vital part of his job was to give nothing away that might have encouraged or discouraged viewers, whether British or Argentinian, about how things were going in the South Atlantic.

How to prevent a civil war
A much more surprising case was Nelson Mandela’s first speech after being released from prison in 1990. Here was a highly effective communicator, whose words at his trial 27 years earlier are to be found in most books of great speeches, and who had had the best part of three decades to prepare an inspiring and memorable text. But it was not to be. As if modeling his performance on the Queen’s Speech, he buried his head in the script and spoke in a flat measured tone that came across as completely lacking in the kind of passion everyone was expecting from someone who had suffered so much and was held in such high regard by his audience.

Having waited for years for this historic event, anticipating something on a par with Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, I remember being disappointed and surprised by what I saw and heard from the balcony of City Hall in Cape Town. It was only later that it dawned on me that this was another case where rousing rhetoric would have been completely counter-productive. The political situation in South Africa was poised on a knife-edge and his release from prison had only happened at all because the apartheid regime was crumbling. It was a moment when anything more inspiring from Mandela might have come across as a call to arms and could easily have prompted an immediate uprising or civil war. But the political understanding with the minority white government was that the African National Congress would keep the lid on things for long enough to enable a settlement to be negotiated. As when the Queen opens parliament, Mr Mandela knew exactly what he was doing, how to do it and that he could not have done otherwise.

Displaying neutrality
So as well as listening to the content of the Queen’s Speech on 3rd December, it is also worth close inspection as an object lesson on how to address an audience if you’re ever in a position of having to convey complete neutrality and detachment. Or, if you’d rather rise to the much more usual challenge of trying to inspire your audience, pay close attention to the way she delivers it -- and then do exactly the opposite.

'I was flattered' 'to be told' that my thoughts on the passive 'had been noticed'...

One thing I've noticed about unsolicited comments on one of my books is that I'm often surprised by what a reader had actually noticed, especially when it's a passage that you'd forgotten you'd ever written - which is what happened in this particular case: a short section on when speakers might find the passive tense useful and occasionally ignore the blanket recommendation against it by the designers of grammar checkers like the one that comes with Micosoft Word.

Twitter's response:
Another thing I've now learned is that Twitter can generate some interesting and unexpected interpretations of whatever it is that you've written.

About a week ago, Brad Phillips posted a blog asking 'Why passive language isn't as bad as you think'. In a later tweet, he asked "What did you think of @maxatkinson's arguments for strategic times to employ the passive voice?" which prompted Ned Barnett (@nedbarnett) , to whom thanks also, came back with the following series of tweets (with my reaction to each one in red):

"No offense to Mr Atkinson, but I thought his example of research was weak and straw-manish, deflecting... (reading it again, I didn't think what I wrote about its use to convey 'generality, objectivity and detachment' was too far off the mark). 

"There are uses for the passive voice, but not in PR, speechmaking or to the media - it's a responsibility dodge... (Agreed).

"his most telling examples were the bureaucratic ones, where responsibility must be avoided at all costs... (Agreed, but I thought that's more or less what I'd written)

"In the real world. there aren't many cases where passive voice statements can't be improved by active voice." (Maybe, but I'm less than fully convinced by this).

As I have no problem with most of what Mr Barnett said, I was a bit disappointed that there was very little for us to have an argument about.  I was also disappointed to realise that he (and presumably other readers) might have fewer grounds for complaint if only I'd been taken more care about how I had worded the original.

On the plus side:
But I'm still very grateful to Messrs. Philllips and Barnett, not only for spreading the word about my book to a much bigger English-speaking market than there is in the UK, but also for getting me to think more closely about two other speeches where detachment and neutrality definitely did matter or does matter.

I'm referring to Nelson Mandela's speech on release from prison and those of the annual Queen's speeches to the UK parliament. I hadn't inspected the texts of the speeches to see whether or not the passive features in them, but it's something that may now be well worth doing - as background to which, see The Queen's Speech: an exception that proves the ruler).

(Details of my next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation are HERE).

Is Paddy Ashdown reverting to type after 32 years?



Paddy Ashdown's speech to the Liberal Democrat Conference earlier today made me wonder whether he might be reverting to type after the 32 years since he made his first televised speech at a Liberal Assembly.

Although not wearing a tie may have recently become the fashion among top politicians (and business leaders), it certainly wasn't in 1981 - even if you were a prospective parliamentary candidate who was going to have wait another two years before knowing whether or not you would succeed in becoming an M.P.

But that didn't stop the young PPC for Yeovil, who spoke sans tie and sans suit - though, as I noted in my original post of the clip, 'the podium unfortunately prevents us from seeing whether or not he was also wearing sandals' (HERE):

In the same post, I also noted 'This was Ashdown in post-military mode, barking out his lines to the troops' ,  and I was struck by the fact that there seemed to be quite a lot of 'barking' in the way he delivered his lines to the troops this morning (see the above clip).



But in one aspect of his delivery this morning he was not reverting to type, as he seems to have taken a leaf out of Nick Clegg's book when it comes to the apparently unscripted 'management guru' style of delivery - which, as regular readers will know, I regard as something of a mixed blessing, at least until the jury returns...


Other posts on the 'management guru' style of speaking:


George Osborne speaks into thin air at a building site somewhere in London

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Readers will know that I've been mystified by the locations at which the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer have delivered some rather important recent speeches (see list of related posts below).

Finding out exactly where, when and to whom he made his speech on the economy this morning has been quite a challenge.

The Daily Express tells us that he was at a building site in East London and, according to Sky News, he was "addressing an audience of academics, think tanks and businesses in London'.

As usual at such events, there was no hint of a response from anyone in the audience, if indeed anyone was there at all.

Also as usual, there's a weird backdrop of a blank window with a bar chart to the left that looks like a rather creative use of scaffolding - unless, of course, it's the latest in templates from PowerPoint...


Related Posts:

Two speakers speak at the same time in the New York mayoral election: exception that proves a rule?


This extraordinary 'conversation' between a voter and Anthony Wiener, a New York City mayoral candidate, is making me think again about one of the most basic rules of turn-taking, namely: 'one speaker speaks at a time'*.

New Yorkers may of course be an exception that proves the rule.

But, as I lack the transcription skills of the late Gail Jefferson, my chances of demonstrating that it's merely an extreme case of 'overlap competition'**,  in which they were actually closely orientating to what each other said on a turn-by-turn basis, are minimal.

* A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation by: Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A Schegloff, Gail Jefferson,Language, Vol. 50, No. 4. (1974), pp. 696-735.

**See also 'Interview techniques, politicians and how we judge them.'

(Next open course on Speechwriting & Presentation details are HERE .