Some sound-bites are rubbish

Nov 7 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Tony Blair’s former speechwriter tells Peter Elson how a working knowledge of Les Dawson can save a Prime Minister’s dignity

FREE thinking – and free speech – are topics that Cherie Blair, Crosby-born barrister and wife of our former Prime Minister, holds dear to her heart.

Not that she wanted to endorse one particular example ascribed to her when it was claimed that she publicly branded former Chancellor Gordon Brown as a liar at last year’s Labour Party Conference in Manchester.

Gordon Brown was using his speech to effect a public reconciliation with the Prime Minister Tony Blair, saying he regretted their differences.

As Mr Brown told the conference: “It has been a privilege for me to work with and for the most successful ever leader and Labour Prime Minister”, the news agency Bloomberg reported that Mrs Blair said “Well, that's a lie”, as she heard the Chancellor's words on a big screen in the nearby exhibition centre.

There was widespread despair at the highest levels that the meticulous attempts to patch up the relationship between the two architects of New Labour had been so carelessly damaged.

What can be done in such circumstances? According to top political speechwriter Philip Collins, you turn to that hitherto overlooked political thinker Les Dawson (yes, that Les Dawson) to get you out of a jam.

“Cherie Blair’s alleged remark about Gordon Brown happened the night before and we knew we had to refer to it. We all sat around trying to work out how we could deal with this problem,” says Philip, who will be appearing at Free Thinking 07 Festival of Ideas in Liverpool, on Saturday.

“Tony had his final keynote speech as Prime Minister the next day, and the remark could not be ignored as the television and newspapers were full of it.

“We had to address it in some way. It was so difficult a situation, everyone was sitting around looking so glum which, naturally, is the worst possible atmosphere to think of a joke.

“To clear my head, I walked around the block to think about the components of it. I thought it’s like some music hall set-up about ‘the wife’ and the guy next door.

“I thought there’s got to be something about that, said by Arthur Askey or someone. So I went through likely people’s gags and I remembered this old Les Dawson mother-in-law joke, which we could adapt.

“So we put into Tony’s speech that one thing he was certain of was that his wife ‘wasn’t going to run off with the man next door’.

“It went down very well, acknowledging Cherie’s alleged remark, the relationship with No 11 Downing Street and, most importantly, relieving the tension by allowing everyone to laugh it off and then move on.

“This shows how humour is such a vital weapon, as if properly used there is no better way of drawing a line under some awkward business so it does not dominate and undermine what you really want to say.

“But you’ve got to be very careful with humour in political speeches, as you’re not writing a stand-up comedy turn.

“The irony was, strangely enough, that the writing team had been thinking all week that we needed a joke at that point and then the reason to put a specific one in happened.”

Philip’s talk at the Festival on Saturday is called “Rhetoric in a prosaic age” and the difficulties of writing political speeches these days.

Essentially, the big subjects have gone, he believes, and our language has changed a great deal in style, which makes the speechwriter’s job even more difficult.

“If you look back a century to Lloyd George’s big speeches, the language is far more flowery and florid, but that was the public mode of address at the time. Should you write speeches like that now, people would think you had gone mad.”

A century ago, this rather more grandiose style of writing was accepted also, as the political public meeting was the main form of direct communication of ideas before the mass media.

The major politicians would probably speak for about two hours at a time at a big occasion, and the speech would have been deeply researched.