Monthly Archives: August 2021

Tom Tugendhat deserved applause

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In the House of Commons in the British Parliament last Wednesday 18 August, A spellbinding speech was delivered by Tom Tugendhat MP.

If his name is unfamiliar to you and you clicked it to learn about him on the hyperlinked page, you will quickly suspect that he was talking about the tragedy that is currently Afghanistan. You will of course be right. It was because of the Afghanistan crisis that Parliament was sitting at all.

The crisis caused a special recall of Members from their summer recess on that day, and they were crowded onto the benches.

They listened intently to this emotional speech, delivered with quiet, restrained passion by a man who had walked the walk, was now talking the talk, and somehow holding himself together.

They listened in silence till he shattered the pained decorum with a beautiful aside that granted the relief of an explosive laugh. If you think that must have been in poor taste, you haven’t yet heard it. I can spot a joke that has been deployed often enough for the timing to have been perfected. This was one, and he was right to use it here.

It was the only sound from the House till another MP intervened to deploy a parliamentary technical trick to bestow upon Tugendhat enough time to finish. And the next sound after that was the warm applause from both sides of the House when he did finish.

The applause was well deserved. It was an outstanding speech.

Dennis Prager commended

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In December 2016 The Herzl Institute held a conference at Glen Cove, NY, under the title of Jewish-Christian Alliance: Reclaiming and Rebuilding Conservatism.

One of the speakers was Dennis Prager who spoke on the 19th which happened auspiciously to be my 70th birthday. He of course is a mere stripling, being nearly two years younger.

Was this a very bald opening or did the producers of the video top’n’tail the footage to deliver an ultra clean start? I have no way of being certain, but I tend towards the latter because we do not see him even draw breath. Regardless, it does demonstrate the impact and power of bald openings, which I why I recommend them to all my trainees.

Prager is a proper speaker. I say that not only because he shoots from the hip but because he has a very rare quality to which I draw the attention of readers whenever we come across it (the last time was back in November with Antonin Scalia). He addresses a large audience in a hall, while sounding as if he is conducting a fireside chat. He speaks with his audience rather than to it. And the fireside chat feeling extends even into when he raises his voice for emphasis.

He also contrives to make everything sound new and spontaneous. I don’t mean to disparage by saying he “contrives”, but he has obviously said everything in this speech before – many times. Not necessarily in this precise structure, or even these precise words, but every path he takes here is very well trodden by him; yet it sounds new and spontaneous. One device he uses to achieve this is interrupting himself at a carefully timed tactical moment (the technical term is Anopodoton), as if a fresh angle on what he is saying has just occurred to him. I just described it as “carefully timed” because the self-interruption comes at the split-second when the rest of the interrupted sentence has become obvious and therefore does not need to be heard. When someone speaks as skilfully as this I find it a joy to witness. He is good.

And he needs to be good because he is fighting back against a formidable foe which has amassed enormous global power by pretending to be oppressed. Leftism is the richest, most potent, most influential, most tyrannical ‘victim’ the world has ever seen, but don’t take my word for it: listen to the speech. Even if you are a full card-carrying member of the choir, this sermon will teach you lots.

There is one jaw-dropping revelation that has quite a long lead-in, but the meat of it begins at 27:05. It is not directly relevant to his message, but it is fascinating nonetheless.

I commend this speech, every bit of it.

Larry Elder and stories

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In July 2019 – while Trump was still US President and before Covid sent the world mad – the Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University held their 2019 Western Conservative Summit. Speaking at it was Larry Elder.

https://youtu.be/5AMV6R4N2Eg

When you have a radio show with a daily audience of 1.5 million, a paltry couple of thousand in a stadium is nothing. So why does he show such clear nerve symptoms – especially during his Hump? It is because the two media are completely different, and if you ever doubted it here is your evidence. For a couple of minutes he is rushing his words, stumbling and showing that he is far from comfortable. This man can speak, as we will discover, but he has had not enough need to learn nerve-control techniques in this specific medium. However many millions of ears are customarily on the other side of your radio microphone, public speaking remains a foreign country – and vice versa.

He noticeably relaxes as he begins to talk about how he got into radio. At the front of this story, which he has evidently told often, he gets a well-deserved laugh. Hump starts receding.

It’s not just the audience’s bestowing the laugh, though that is a powerful drug, it’s that he is telling a story. Stories grab audiences and relax them, and there are few things more effective at relaxing a speaker than a relaxed audience. You can clearly see his nerves melting away till he hits us at 2:00 with a beautiful punchline, and thereafter he’s on a roll, if still rather edgy and nervous.

At 9:30 he begins another story which takes the whole of the rest of his time. It concerns his difficult relationship with his father. It’s a good story with another excellent punchline with which he concludes the speech.

Larry Elder is articulate and coherent. His communication armoury is very well stocked, and I’m not surprised he has such a large audience for his radio programme; but if he plans much more speaking before live audiences he owes it to his own sanity to familiarise himself with the different techniques.