Max Atkinson's Blog

Tories 'Bomb Middle England' - by Banksy

News from the Conservative Party conference about government plans to abolish child benefit for higher earners is neatly summed up by graffiti artist Banksy in his picture Bomb Middle England, in which fizzing bombs are being propelled towards the target on a bowling green:

What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop, Part 2: What do the flags mean?

In a post during last year's Conservative Party conference - What a peculiar Tory conference backdrop - I reported being baffled by what the leafy suburbs that kept moving backwards and forwards behind the speakers ware supposed to be telling us.

This year's backdrop (above) certainly looks slicker, but two aspects of it have got me as stumped as i was last year.

One is that the blue striped background (especially when appearing in close-up behind a speaker) reminds me of the Greek national flag, raising the possibility that the subliminal message is something along the lines of: if we don't do what we say, we'll end up with as big a financial mess as Greece.

The other is the question of why the Union Flag on the right is split up into tatty-looking fragments? Is this supposed to be telling us something about the broken society, or what?

Whatever the answers, the main distraction is essentially the same as last year, namely why are they taking the risk of diverting our attention away from what's being said by posing such intriguing mysteries for us to think about when we're supposed to be listening?

Delayed applause for William Hague's boast about being in government

Well, well well - this year's party conference season gets curiouser and curiouser when it comes to audiences delaying applause at key points where you might have expected them to show more instant and enthusiastic agreement.

It took the Liberal Democrats 2-3 seconds to get their hands apart for positive references to the coalition government by Nick Clegg (HERE) and Vince Cable (HERE).

The Labour Party withheld applause altogether when Ed Miliband said that he aimed to "shape the centre ground of politics" and then delayed their applause for his second set of warm words about the 'centre ground' (HERE)

Yesterday, when William Hague reminded the Conservative Party that this was the first time since 1996 that they'd met as the party of government, it took them the best part of 3 seconds to respond - even though 'boasts about us' have a tremendous track record when it comes to triggering applause in political speeches (for more on which, see HERE).

'Clap on the name': a practical tip for Ed Miliband and/or his speechwriters

Yesterday, I mentioned an example in Ed Miliband's first speech as Labour Party leader where the audience might have applauded more promptly had the two parts of a positive-negative contrast been written the other way around (HERE).

There were also some examples that reminded me of two posts back in March, showing how to use the 'clap on the name' technique to ensure that the applause comes in on time:

The basic principle is that you identify or hint at the identity of the person to be introduced or commended, say a few words about them and then name him or her (for more on which, see Lend Me Your Ears, pp. 324-327).

Miliband shows how to do it

In this first clip, the person being commended is identified (the deputy leader), there's a word about her (she's "fantastic") and her name then prompts instant applause:

Miliband shows how not to do it (1)

In this next sequence, announcing that he's going to talk about 'friends of mine who are standing down from the shadow cabinet' gives us a pretty strong hint about who they'll be. But going straight on to name Alistair Darling is enough to set the audience off and runs the risk of the first commendable point being drowned out by the applause.

But those weren't all the warm words he's got for Mr Darling, so he has to add the rest as a postscript after the applause has died down and the final "thank you" is then greeted with silence.

A sight revision of the script would have avoided any such glitches and ensured that the ovation came in exactly on cue. This would have been even more assured given that he actually had three complimentary things to say (though the triple sequence had been obscured by the applause).

Rewriting it along the following lines would have restored the power of the rule of three and, because the audience would have had more time to get ready for the name, they would probably have produced a longer and more enthusiastic burst of applause):

The first is someone who kept his cool amidst one of the worst economic storms in our economic history,

who we'll always remember for the way he steered Britain through that crisis

and to whom we all owe a big debt of thanks for what he did:

Alistair Darling<[INSTANT APPLAUSE]

Miliband shows how not to do it (2)

Immediately after that, the same thing happens again when he names Jack Straw too early, so that the other nice things he has to say about him have to be deferred until after the premature applause has died down. And, by starting where it did, the ovation again interrupts the flow of what would otherwise have been a perfectly effective three-part list:

In this case too, things would have gone more smoothly by simply changing the sequence to preserve the three-part list and leave the name until the end:

.. my second friend is one of the most loyal servants of our party,

someone who is Labour to his core

someone who is Blackburn to his core:

Jack Straw<[INSTANT APPLAUSE].

Nervous, awkward and inexperienced?

Technical details like this (and the ones discussed in the previous post) not only have implications for the audience, but also contribute towards media reporters drawing conclusions like the above, as they did after the speech.

The are also the kind of thing that led me to suggest over the last couple of days, both here and on Twitter, that there was some rather amateurish speech-writing on show.

For Mr Miliband and his supporters, the good news is that such problems are very easy to cure.

As a 'non-aligned' blogger, I'm obviously not offering my services or touting for trade from team Miliband. But they can mug up on all they need to know from Lend Me Your Ears or Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy, both of which are dirt cheap (or, as a marketing expert has told me to say, 'competitively priced').

Delayed applause for Ed Miliband's claims on the 'centre ground'

Interpreting where and when audiences applaud (or not) looks like being a major theme of this year's party conference season.

Yesterday, the media made much of the fact that Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman applauded when Ed Miliband declared that Labour's involvement in the Iraq war was was wrong - and was apparently chastised for doing so by David Miliband because she'd voted for it.

It now it looks as though this may have been the last straw for the older Miliband's 'graciousness' in the face of defeat and is about to drive him out of front-line politics.

Withholding applause

Some television news reports also showed us two top union leaders resolutely not applauding (and looking grumpy) while the rest of the audience clapped his announcement that he'd 'have no truck' with irresponsible strikes - which reminded me of a vintage TV BBC Newsnight interview in which Peter Snow pressed Francis Pym, a senior cabinet member in the Thatcher Government, for not applauding enough during a speech by Sir Geoffrey Howe, the then Chancellor of the Exchequer (which you can see HERE).

Delayed applause

As regular readers may have noticed, this year's conference season is becoming a gold mine of examples of audiences delaying applause for key points that, if they agreed more unequivocally with them, should have prompted a rather more instant response.

Luke warm LibDem support for the coalition?

At the LibDem conference, this happened in the speeches by Nick Clegg (HERE) and Vince Cable (HERE) in response to warm words about the coalition. The mainstream media didn't seem to notice either of these hints that LibDem activists' support for the coalition might be rather less enthusiastic than the official line suggests it is.

Lukewarm Labour support for the 'centre ground'?

Given all the talk of 'Red Ed' a similarly contentious issue at the conference was whether the new leader really would be taking the party away on a leftwards journey from 'the centre ground'.

And, although the audience may have applauded instantly and enthusiastically towards the end of the speech when he dismissed the 'Red Ed' tag, their earlier response when he said that Labour must stay in the centre was rather more luke warm.

In this first clip, his aim to "shape the centre ground of politics" is met with silence. Then, when he goes on to say "if we are not this party, nobody else will be", it takes the audience just over a second to get their hands apart:

A few moments later, he produces a contrast (normally a sure-fire way to prompt instant applause) - "it's a generation that will fight for the centre ground, not allow it to be dominated or defined by our opponents" - at which point the audience delays for about 1.5 seconds before the clapping gets under way:

What do the delays mean?

There are at least three ways of interpreting these delays.

Labour Party activists are not very enthusiastic about re-occupying the 'centre ground'.
They don't believe that he means it given his attacks on New Labour throughout his leadership campaign (and in this speech)).
The delays might have been the result of poor speech-writing.

On this third point, this was one of a number of contrasts in Miliband's speech that ended on a negative rather than a positive and prompted delayed applause. In other posts (HERE and HERE), I've pointed out that contrasts tend to work better when the negative comes first and the positive comes second.

So these noticeable delays may mean little more than that he and/or his speechwriters still have a quite lot to learn. If time allows, expect more blogging on this in due course....

Did David Miliband lose because he was too old and experienced?

A killer line from Ronald Reagan, then aged 73, in one of the 1984 TV debates with Walter Mondale (56) came when he said that he was not going to exploit for political purposes his opponent's youth and inexperience (HERE).

The joke served him well, but wouldn't work at all in the UK today - where increasing youthfulness and inexperience has been steadily becoming the norm among our leaders since Harold Wilson became Prime Minister at the tender age of 48 - as can be seen from the following two tables.

Table 1: Age and experience of current UK main party leaders

Age on

becoming leader

Years as an MP before

becoming leader

Miliband

Cameron

Clegg

Table 2: Age and experience of Prime Ministers since Wilson

Age on

becoming leader

Years as an MP on

beoming leader

Callaghan

Brown

Wilson

Thatcher

Heath

Major

Blair

'The torch has passed'?

Having heard Ed Miliband repeatedly reminding us that the Labour Party has passed to 'a new generation', I've been half-expecting him to go the whole hog and recycle the rest of a famous line from John F. Kennedy's inaugural speech about the torch having been passed to a younger generation.

But I don't think he will, because Kennedy wasn't just talking about youthfulness, but about what his generation had experienced:

"the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace ... "

For our current party leaders, the risk of evoking Kennedy is that the experience of active service in a world war contrasts rather too obviously with the that of 'being tempered by spending pretty much the whole of your adult life working for and as professional politicians'.

Or has the candle gone out?

When Anthony Eden (aged 58) took over from Winston Churchill (aged 81) as leader of the Conservative Party in 1955, my late mother-in-law considered him "far too young and inexperienced for the job of Prime Minister."

A bit extreme by today's standards, perhaps, but I can't help wondering if we've reached a point where the risk of being led into the next general election by someone as ancient as 50 may have played a part in Labour's rejection of David Miliband in favour of his younger brother.

Ed Miliband "gets it" in his bid to bond with the brethren

A problem for Oxford-educated Labour leaders is how to bond with the masses in general and the core vote in particular.

Harold Wilson did it by retaining enough traces of a Yorkshire accent to sound like 'one of them'.

In interviews and chat shows, Tony Blair occasionally (and rather unconvincingly) lapsed into 'Estuary English', inserting glottal stops at points where he would more usually have used a perfectly enunciated 't' sound.

Glo'al stops in Donny?
Having spent five years at school in Doncaster, I've often wondered how the town's most famous MP, having been parachuted into a safe seat by the Labour Party high command, was managing to get along with the locals.

One thing I'd already noticed was that Ed Miliband seems even keener than Tony Blair on glottle stops. You'll hear quite a few of them in this clip, even though they're quite alien to the regional accent in that part of South Yorkshire - where the sound is typically heard as proof that the speaker must be 'a bloody Southerner.'

"I get it..."
In yesterday's leadership acceptance speech (which can be seen in full HERE), another ploy was on show with the repetitive use of contemporary youthful jargon, in which the verb "to get" is preferred to more traditional verbs like to understand, to know or to appreciate - six times in a row in this particular sequence.

Now that Mr Miliband has got it (by which I mean, in case there's any ambiguity, the leadership of the Labour Party), it will be interesting to see whether he's got any more such folksy devices up his sleeve as he bids to bond with the broader masses.

Also of possible interest: