Listening to Boris Johnson's leader's speech at the Tory party conference today meant that you had to put up with an elementary guide to rhetoric for beginners and a mass of corny old clichés
Behind him was the 3 parted alliterative multi-coloured slogan: BUILD BACKBETTER.
Johnson also want's to "build a new Jerusalem" and, if you think it's going to echo William Blake (i.e. do it in England's 'green and pleasant land') the speech claimed that he's discovered green energy too!
Even The Guardian seems to have been quiteimpressed:
"Boris Johnson has said in his speech to the Conservative party conference that Britain must not return to the status quo after the coronavirus pandemic, promising a transformation akin to the 'New Jerusalem' the postwar cabinet pledged in 1945. The prime minister also mounted a robust defence of the private sector, saying 'free enterprise' must lead the recovery and that he intended to significantly roll back the extraordinary state intervention that the crisis had necessitated."
What I'd like to know is who writes this kind of garbage?
After all, every Tory's heroine Margaret Thatcher took the business of speaking rather more seriously, she relied on some brilliant writers and she rehearsed. Does Johnson think that, as a former president of the Oxford Union debating society, he doesn't need to bother?
Twitter, it seems, is widely used by authors to advertise their own books – as too are various programmes on BBC Radio 4. Yesterday’s Start the Week, for example was presented by Andrew Marr, who gave two authors who gave each of them about 45 minutes to plug their latest books. One, was former Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams (whose sermons sometimes included 150 word sentences that were unintelligible to listeners). In retirement, he’s become master of a Cambridge college and has just written a book in St. Benedict. I didn’t bother to check the length of his sentences but can report that he hasn’t changed and I shall not be buying his book.
1. Having written quite a few academic books, my first attempt at writing for a wider public was based on research that I’d done (while fellow of an Oxford college) into audience responses to political speeches. Originally published by Methuen in 1984, it’s still in print (thanks to Routlege).
Reading it now, I don’t think I got the hang of writing for a non-academic audience until Chapter 3. Claptrap – which was also used by Granada Television as the title of the World in Action documentary based on findings reported in the book that you can watch on the opening page of my website at speaking.co.uk
2. Twenty years later, after making a living putting into practice the basic principles – i.e. by running hundreds of courses and coaching lindividuals in private and public sectors (+ a few politicians) I wrote a ‘how to do it’ book. This time I was lucky to have a literary agent, Bill Hamilton of AM Heath & Co who understood how to write for different audiences. He taught me how to “address the reader directly.” Without my realising it, a legacy of academic writing was that I was still tending to write in the third person “if a speaker does this… “. Bill suggested I try writing “if you do this….”
His other main piece of advice was that I shouldn’t be afraid of using shortened or elided forms (“don’t” rather than “do not”. etc.) – which as an academic, I’d never have thought of doing. So I went through the original manuacript and, wherever possible changed the text as he’d suggested. At the end of the exercise, I was frankly amazed at how much more ‘readable’ it had made the book.
3. Peter Semper, an old school-friend, was very positive about Lend me your Ears though he did have a ‘but’: “only thing wrong with it is that it’s far too long for business people like me to read on a train or a flight - so why don’t you do a shorter version aimed at us." After a reasonably favourable response from my agent and publishers my agent and publishers, I asked Peter to have a go at producing a shorter version.
Fairly quickly, he sent me a copy of what he’d produced and, thanks to the wonders of word-processing technologly, I could see instantly that he’d only managed to cut it down by about a third – which I didn’t think was enough. So I set about cutting out even more and managed to get rid of another third. The result was Speechmaking and Presentation Made Easy: Seven essential steps to success:
4. During the Labour Party’s annual conference in September 2008, Michael Crick (then political editor of BBC TV’s Newsnight, now on Channel 4 News) suggested that I should start a blog. In June 2009, I reached my 250th blog-post. and realised that it was becoming something of an obsession.
The good news was that it was being favourably received. As Ayd Instone notes in his foreword to this next book (p. 7): “Politics.co.uk awarded it the same score (8/10) as Iain Dale’s Diary, one of the country’s top rated blogs. In their review, they said “Not many blogs out there focus so much on politicians’ presentation styles, so this makes a nice addition…a thoroughly impressive piece of work.”
At which point, I should confess that I personally find reading a book or newspaper easier and more satisfying than reading stuff from a screen, which is why the idea of publishing an edited collection of my blog-posts from 2008-2014 appealed to me. The result was:
Seen & Heard: conversations and commentary on contemporary communication
I found today's news as especially sad, not just because I was a Leeds fan when the young Jack was playing for 2nd division Leeds United (while younger brother 'our kid' Bobby played for 1st division Manchester United), but because this talented player (and manager) appears to have been yet another victim of dementia caused by heading footballs
In 2017, a BBC TV documentary Dementia, Football and Me (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/41902953) presented by Alan Shearer looked at the impact of heading footballs on the brain - and ultimately on players developing dementia. When watching Shearer heading a ball numerous times, I thought it all very well, but when people quite a lot older than him played football, the balls were made of leather, which meant that they got extremely heavy in wet weather (i.e. for most of the football season).
What 's so depressing about the death of Jack Charlton is that he's by no means the only one of the 1966 team to have suffered from dementia. He lasted until he was 83, as did Ray Wilson who also died of it. Martin Peters succombed to it at 76, while manager and former full-back Sir Alf Ramsey died of it at 79. Nobby Stiles (78) is still alive but has advanced dementia.
This adds up to 42% of those directly involved in our winning the world-cup in 1966 falling victim to dementia. I'm hopeless at statistics, but would say that this must surely be statistically very significant.
(An excellent film about Jack Charlton from today's BBC archive can be seen at
![Speech-making and Presentation Made Easy: Seven Essential Steps to Success by [Max Atkinson]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51MS5AYt2yL.jpg)
