Monthly Archives: February 2017

Tony Blair and Bregzit

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On 17 February Open Britain hosted a highly publicised speech by a past British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Open Britain is an organisation which deplores the result of the EU Referendum in June 2016 or, to be fair, as True Democrats they accept the result of the referendum but…

Good, I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.

The media had warned informed us that this speech was coming, and I think most of us found the prospect interesting.

My interest was quickened for two reasons. Blair has an impressive record as a public speaker, and I was keen to see if that was still justified. My other reason, having yearned in vain during the referendum campaign for the remain side to come up with a really strong argument to give me something substantial to chew on, was the hope that he might at last produce something of interest. Shall we see?

The warm-up acts being less than riveting let us turn to Blair himself, beginning at 5:30.

Do you see him plonking paper on that lectern? I remember when he used to speak without script or notes. Has senility set in? Why does he have to consult his script to tell us how nice it is to be with us? And he’s taking no chances with that script. Not only does he have that paper, but also autocue: you can see a perspex screen in front of his right elbow, and he consults it.

Blair always did have some weird pronunciations, and now a new one enters his repertoire. We are repeatedly treated to “Bregzit”. Bless him!

Whoever wrote this script has no notion of the difference between written and spoken English. Or if they have, they are too idle to have learnt how to script the latter. This stuff is ghastly! It’s stiff and stilted. Who, when writing for speaking, churns out pompous rubbish like “rancorous verdict from future generations”? Rancorous is a word I might write, but wouldn’t dream of speaking – except possibly in jest. (Actually I might adopt it for a while to see if it gets laughs. Perhaps I could affect rhotacism – that’s the Jonathan Ross speech impediment.)

My hope of fresh arguments around Bregzit quickly fades. He’s revisiting the same weary avenues, or perhaps I should say culs de sac. He even tries to rub the rust from the ‘reform from within’ line. Let us not forget that this is the man who, when Prime Minister and the EU was clamouring for a reduction in the British rebate, assured us that he would negotiate it only against fundamental reform of the Common Agricultural Policy. In the event he came home with no CAP reform and greatly reduced rebate, thus demonstrating that the EU is not to be reformed and that he is the weakest negotiator since Eve caved in against the serpent.

Speaking of stiff and stilted, take a gander at this doozy at 9:54

“…thus leaving us with no locus on the terrain where the bridge must be constructed.”

That gem should be put in a glass case in a museum somewhere. We know that ‘locus’ is the Latin for ‘place’, but you justifiably break into a foreign language only if it’s a technical term, if doing so uses a nuance not available in English, or you plan to style yourself a prize pillock. Which do you suppose this has contrived?

If you think I am merely exercising a dislike of the man I would point out that he was on this blog four years ago, at which time I defended him against a shoddy sound engineer whose ineptness bordered on sabotage.

Didn’t I read somewhere that he is paid huge amounts to speak? I honestly would pay a fee to not hear him speak. I’d rather stay at home with a good book – or even a bad one.

Leaving aside all of the above I fear that this leaden weasel-fest is an entrenchment speech. It has not the quality to sway anyone; it will merely cause each side to dig in.

Bregzit means Bregzit.

Andreja Pejić surely can’t be so vacuous

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On 7 November, 2016, the Oxford Union hosted a talk and Q&A by Andreja Pejić. That link will tell you that she is a Bosnian model who was born a boy, had an androgynous career modelling both masculine and feminine clothes, eventually transitioning fully to womanhood.

What interested me was not so much the sex-change – big deal: she isn’t the first such speaker on this blog – but the subject of her talk. Assiduous followers may remember that when Stephen Fry delivered one such, also at the Oxford Union, I discussed in depth that this can present a real difficulty.

Her life has been more interesting than that first paragraph suggests, given that her mother is Serbian and father Croatian. This is not a biography blog, so I’ll leave it there for others to explore further if they wish.

I am old enough to have happened to witness a particular notorious TV interview. Simon Dee interviewed George Lazenby whose profile at the time was huge, his having played James Bond. Dee began with some obvious Bond question, but Lazenby swatted it aside and launched into a rant about the assassination of President Kennedy with Dee sitting gobsmacked and unable to get a word in edgeways. A new celebrity is a sitting duck to be indoctrinated by conspiracy-theorists looking to hitch a ride on the voice of the moment, and Lazenby was available. Lazenby’s stunt helped Simon Dee lose his career.

I am afraid I get a very similar feel about this talk from Pejić. She herself calls it a rant, and essentially it’s about how we are heading for World War III. Delivering it the day before the US Presidential Elections she sees little optimism in either result. The talk is scripted, and badly. It’s so incoherent that even she has problems following it. I actually doubt that she wrote it, and that others have hitched a ride as described in my previous paragraph. She may even identify them in the web address she gives at 30:27. Her final sentence immediately follows that, is delivered without looking at the script, and though it’s still not very coherent it comes closer than anything that precedes it.

I find myself hoping that Q&A will tap into her own experience and liberate her natural articulacy. No.

Sebastian Gorka has presence

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Nearly a year ago on 2 March, 2016 the Institute of World Politics hosted a talk from Dr Sebastian Gorka.

I have watched Dr Gorka a couple of times making mincemeat of aggressive opponents on TV programmes, but that’s dialogue and very different from the one-way traffic of a speech. I was interested to see how good he was in monologue.

Also he is now Deputy Assistant to President Trump, and with the world (as distinct from antipathetic mainstream media) holding its collective breath to see how the new POTUS will shape up, it seems worth while to have a look at those advising him.

He begins by laying out his stall, with particular attention to ethos, and while he is doing it the cameraman experiments with trying to see if he can encompass both the speaker and the screen in a single locked-off shot. We quickly learn that he can’t, so we will hear Gorka refer to slides that we cannot see.

I greet this with mixed feelings. This has happened before with this blog. Sometimes I satisfied myself that nothing was lost, and this raised obviously pertinent questions concerning the need for those slides in the first place. In the event this talk comes close to that same conclusion so, out of curiosity, I went looking for other of his talks to learn more about his use of slides. I found this talk delivered to the Westminster Institute on 23 August 2013. The biggest danger with slides is that they compete with the speaker for the audience’s attention, usually through being too numerous or containing too much information. With that single (and old) sample I found that he used few slides, though they were rather overfilled with verbiage. Nevertheless there is a particular reason that I am confident that his slides will never compete with him.

Dr Gorka has presence.

It is an almost indefinable quality, but unmissable when you meet it. It is a quality that can barely be taught, though it can be nurtured, because it has to come completely from within. It cannot be synthesised, cannot be faked. It is built on a measure of inner confidence in your command of the subject; and that command comes firstly through a huge amount of work and secondly through experience – testing and arguing your opinions to destruction. We in the audience cannot help but believe that Gorka really knows what he is talking about.

That is what makes him so formidable in TV interviews, and what gives him that huge presence. His powerful voice also helps. Note that I said powerful, not loud. There is an important difference.

His self-confidence is not hubris: I picked up a few fleeting glimpses of insecurity, but then everyone has insecurity. So they should: it keeps them sharp.

I earnestly commend both the speech and the brief Q&A. They are both depressing and encouraging. The scenario is depressing, the prognosis reveals pinpoints of daylight. Chief amongst the latter is that he is at the POTUS elbow.

Theresa May be a Good thing.

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On 17 January Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered a speech which had been eagerly awaited by many. Since the people of the United Kingdom, on 23 June 2016, had decisively voted to leave the European Union the country had seemed to be stuck in limbo. For the benefit of non-British readers, allow me to outline the background.

Mrs May’s predecessor as Prime Minister, David Cameron, had called the Referendum. He had announced, in a highly publicised speech in January 2013, that he intended to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU, and then put this expected new dispensation to the British people in a referendum during 2017. In 2015 there was a General Election in which this promise of an EU Referendum was a central plank of his campaign. He won the election, launched this renegotiation in a fanfare of trumpets while many of us marvelled at how radically he had watered down his promised demands, went off to Brussels, and came back with essentially nothing. The little he claimed to have been agreed was not remotely binding, and even that was disputed by many European politicians. He rushed into the referendum, rather earlier than originally promised, on a platform that we should vote to remain ruled by this ‘reformed’ regime. Nevertheless he undertook that in the event of the British people voting to leave he would immediately trigger Article 50, the EU exit door, and lead the exit negotiations.

The referendum took place, the people voted for Brexit, and Cameron immediately vanished. He simply welshed on all assurances and left everything for someone else to sort out. That someone turned out to be Mrs Theresa May. Her principal problem was that incredibly the British governing establishment had put no contingency plans in place against the vote going for Brexit, so she had to start from scratch. Thus for six months the country was in limbo, with several establishment figures openly attempting to thwart the expressed democratic will of the British people who in turn were supported by little more than periodic assurances from Mrs May and her cabinet that Article 50 would be triggered before the end of March.

This speech had been loudly heralded as a key piece of progress report.

An opening pause. Immediately I am encouraged.

This video, originally a live, streamed feed, occasionally shows live tweets commenting in a separate window. At 11:07 there is one which expresses the hope that the speech gets more interesting. I can understand this up to a point, because in laying out her stall Mrs May has needed to cover very many bases. I however am in possession of information not then available to that tweeter: there is half-an-hour still to come.

Do you have more than 40 minutes to listen to the whole thing? If not I can recommend two short excerpts that summarise effectively. This is so much better than my cherry-picking quotes. It’s safer too, because of being less susceptible to my confirmation bias.

Between 31:08 and 31:43 she very clearly summarises all that she has thus far covered. If you want to stick with it to 32:58 you will hear how she intends to keep her cards face-down,

 “because this is not a game, or a time for opposition for opposition’s sake.”

You may find that this satisfies your curiosity or that it excites your appetite to hear more. Either way, I whole-heartedly commend all this speech.

The other excerpt is her ending. I recommend that you pick it up at 38:55 with the words, “I don’t believe…” I have heard worse perorations, and didn’t care that it had no auxesis, because the content and the occasion did not call for it.

Only a few days later she delivered another big speech, this time in the USA. In it she was busy massaging the ego of a huge ally, but still I felt that she meant what she said. It is this quality that I like. Even if I don’t always agree with everything she says and stands for, I don’t feel embarrassed that she is representing my country. That speech did call for an auxesis to herald the peroration, and it got it. If you don’t listen to the whole thing you can pick up the peroration at 33:00.

Like or loathe her political position, she does not beat around its bush. More and more I sense that this woman is a WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get – and I find that hugely refreshing after the dismal succession of duplicitous twits that have been representing us for a quarter of a century. (The word ‘twits’ was a slight edit from the first word there.)

She makes me feel strangely optimistic.