Tag Archives: Cardinal 2

Daniel Hannan: smooth as a kitten’s wrist.

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From Auracle Newsletter for March, 2012

For a couple of months I have been gestating for this newsletter, a critique on a speech made by Daniel Hannan MEP to a distinguished audience of mainly Germans and British.

Then a few weeks ago the EU parliament had a recess and Hannan went off on a tour of the Anglosphere. Very soon Twitter began buzzing with how he had wowed an American audience which was an interesting comparison with the previous example as it showed how – true to Cardinal 2 in The Face & Tripod – he varied his delivery to match his audience. I was just wondering whether to make a choice between them or conduct a comparison of the two, when twittering began afresh on a speech to an Australian audience.  In no time the Twitterati were getting excited over another speech he had made in Canada, but I decided I had enough for this exercise.

1. In May 2011 a debate was held at the Royal Geographical Society. The Motion was, “Germany no longer needs Europe – the dream is over”. Hannan spoke for the motion. His opening is brilliant: he captures the imagination immediately, making a strong argument in the process. Furthermore he attributes the argument to others, thereby doing several clever things simultaneously. He burnishes his image by modestly stepping aside from taking the credit; he inflates the credibility of the argument by citing distinguished authors by name (remember the proper noun directive in F&T); and he heads off any criticism of non-originality.

Which of my past trainees remembers my talking of the ‘muffed-word-test’? Essentially this is not about whether you muff words, which everyone does occasionally, but about how well you correct it with good humoured smoothness. Now watch Hannan at 2:50.

Dig out your copy of F&T and re-read the small section entitled ‘Negotiate’. Then watch this speech from 4:12. Hannan hands out a succession of bouquets to buy enough credit for the message he reaches at around 5:00.

At 5:25 he addresses what could be a knotty issue and dramatizes it well enough to elicit a ripple of laughter and applause; but because it is a knotty issue he speaks on through the applause in order not only to minimise it but be seen to minimise it lest anyone in the audience should take offence. This man is very smart and skilled.  Now let’s look at the second speech listed.

2. In February 2012 Hannan was one of the speakers at CPAC (Centre for American Politics & Citizenship).  In his opening, he uttered words he would never have used in the previous speech, “I gotta tell you…” This is a classic example of tailoring to your audience, as I direct in Cardinal 2 of F&T.  Did you, like me, hold your metaphorical breath lest he took it too far – what one might call ‘the oldest swinger in town’ syndrome? In the event he stopped comfortably short of that. You can hear the atmosphere buzzing in the hall, and he responds to it with just enough controlled ‘mirroring’.

At 4:00 he gives us some throw-away humour concerning the phallic shape of the Washington Monument; but, true to the throw-away principle (see my chapter on humour), he does not beg a laugh but continues as if he’d never said it – and gets a huge laugh. He also delivers the humour in a way that is oblique enough for anyone who might have been offended not to understand it. Very sound.

At 16:30 he gives us an anaphora repetition – less prosperous, less independent, less democratic, less free. Does he harpoon a potential triad by having four elements in his repetition or are the first three the triad which are then emphasised and locked into place, as it were, through the addition of the fourth? I think the latter, because he stops enumerating with his fingers after the third. At any rate, it all works beautifully because it receives a very respectable six seconds of applause, which could easily be longer except he curtails it by starting speaking again.

That’s the second time in this critique that I have found him choosing to kill his own applause. Consider: if by not begging laughter or applause you enhance your standing with your audience, how much more do you do it by actively suppressing them?  In the blink of an eye he conveys an eagerness to get on with imparting the message and the security of an ego that does not need reassurance from applause. Myriad positive messages are being transmitted.

When a speaker is as good as this I cannot help but be super-picky. If you’ve read F&T you know how keen I am on the use of parallels. For some years I edited a rather scholarly wine journal. At 26:38 Hannan goes into a viticulture anecdote-and-metaphor that is true but technically incorrect in a tiny detail which though small is crucial enough fatally to undermine the parallel. What a party-pooping stinker I am to have told you that! Let’s move to the third…

3. Later in February 2012 Hannan spoke at the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne. At the start I suspect you might be as bemused as I at how sombre he appears to be with an Australian audience. Also we do not seem to have joined it quite at the beginning. This bothered me so much that I dug some more; and I found another source of the speech here. It turns out that the first version begins just over 12 minutes into the whole thing. Perhaps more significantly that version claims to have been posted by Hannan himself, so it was he who apparently edited out those first 12 minutes before posting – in which case he needs to consider hard the difficulties and dangers of that sort of self-editing.

(There is on YouTube a severely cut-down version of a reading I did in 2010 of the whole of the Gospel of St Mark. I did the cutting-down. Several people who were there have observed that I cut out and I kept the wrong bits – and I fear they may be right.) Hannan’s exuberant seduction of his audience in the first few minutes of the uncut version of this speech is lovely to witness, and a rare public insight into his fun-time personality. But he excised all that in favour of later serious arguments which we can see him making a hundred times elsewhere.  I’d be the last to quarrel with his enthusiasm for his message – that’s Cardinal 1, a cornerstone of my training – but in this instance it may have caused an error.

This man is a first class speaker. For one thing he is beautifully economical; and I can identify at least two reasons for this. There are strict time limits on speeches in the EU parliament, so he has trained himself to get on, package his point clearly, and get off. You can see examples all over YouTube.

And he has learnt that the way to use fewer words is to use only the right ones. Those who have attended master classes with me will verify that I advocate the reading aloud of poetry as a way to improve many skills in this medium. Beautiful and economic turns of phrase work themselves into your mind by osmosis and become habit-forming. Not only do you find yourself getting better at finding the right words to convey the precise nuance you seek, but they trip off the tongue with less and less effort. Is there the remotest doubt but that Daniel Hannan is very well read? I began my working life as an actor an aeon ago, and was playing Shakespeare with the National Theatre before he was born; also I have directed half-a dozen Shakespeare productions. But he can out-quote me on Shakespeare without breaking sweat. In the complete version of that speech in Australia he effortlessly quotes 25 seconds of St Matthew’s gospel to make a point. At the 5:10 mark he makes merely the slightest reference to an incident in Jason’s Golden Fleece caper before ‘throwing it away’. All the above speeches are littered with what Logan Pearsall Smith meant when he wrote –

There is one thing that matters, to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people.

But such a chime of words can jangle unless delivered with the confidence of familiarity. Hannan is manifestly familiar with everything he quotes – and that’s the key. On one recent occasion in the EU parliament he made a speech which consisted only of a single verse from a poem by G K Chesterton.

So, in conclusion, is he flawless? No, but then no one is. Every so often he allows words to die at the ends of phrases. It is not laziness: his enunciation is exemplary and he uses rising cadences well. It is done deliberately for effect, and it can be very effective, but care has to be taken not to sacrifice intelligibility for that effect. At 7:12 in the second of our speeches there are three examples in quick succession – the words “equivalent”, “independence” and “freedoms”. I’m being picky: President Obama is much worse.

I described Hannan in the title as being smooth as a kitten’s wrist. It’s worth noting that smooth though the feline wrist may be it is in close proximity to some very sharp claws. Hannan has a well-deserved reputation for maintaining strict courtesy to friend and foe alike, yet the speech that drew him to the attention of millions was the one wherein he eviscerated Gordon Brown in the EU Parliament.

There is something else that is interesting about that. The examples of speeches we have examined here I have listed by number, by venue, by date but not by what was said. None of them has a FACE! You try doing a YouTube search with the words “Devalued Prime Minister” and that Gordon Brown speech will fly onto your screen. He gave that speech a FACE – apparently by accident. If he had read F&T, particularly Cardinal 3, perhaps it would have been deliberate; and perhaps he would have made it a habit.

Portillo – Who Dares Wins. He dared: did this speech win?

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Michael Portillo’s Who Dares Wins speech in 1995 has often since been characterised as an embarrassing failure. But was it? This critique is lifted from the December ’11 Auracle Newsletter.

In the mid-nineties I did some work with MORI (now Ipsos MORI); and one day I was having a meeting with their then chairman, Bob (now Sir Robert) Worcester, doyen of pollsters in the UK. A telephone call came through from some press person who was important enough for Bob to interrupt the meeting and answer questions – though he was quite relaxed about my remaining the other side of his desk, ears inevitably flapping. The gist was that the Conservatives stood not a chance at the next election. Since so-called Black Wednesday (September ’92) their stock had fallen so far with the electorate that not even contriving the Second Coming (I’m sure I particularly remember that reference, but my memory could be tricking me) could save them.

This then was the political climate in which Michael Portillo, Defence Minister at the time, made his Who Dares Wins speech at the Conservative Party Conference in 1995. I never saw it or any excerpts on television – I was far too busy. My memory is that it was regarded as an embarrassment. But then most of the main-stream media at the time were running with the anti-Major-government tide. Also any form of expressed patriotism was deeply unfashionable; so this speech never stood a chance in the press.

Now, more than sixteen years later and thanks to YouTube, I am able to watch it and make my own judgement – as are you.

One of the first things to notice is that there are two versions on YouTube. The other is nearly twice as long as this one; so what’s missing in this one? Answer: most of the applause. Yes, gentle reader, Portillo – true to my exhortation in Cardinal Two of The Face & Tripod – positioned the speech brilliantly. He hit the audience’s G-Spot, and they gave him three minutes of ecstatic standing ovation. There’s also another conspicuous success staring us in the face (pun intended), and I’ll return to that in a while.

Let’s go through the speech, cherry picking in the process –

  • We don’t appear to have the beginning (nor does the other version) but as we join it he launches into an overt triad (see the relevant chapter in The Face & Tripod) which he immediately expands. This is greeted with about 9 seconds of applause. [N.B. 8 seconds is par for any mid-speech applause: 12% improvement on par is very good, particularly this early.]
  • 0:28 another triad – “war is messy, brutal and violent”
  • 0:46 an attributed quote which introduces a sustained reflection on the evils of war
  • 1:55 a lengthy triad which builds in intensity. He makes a small error here inasmuch as he gets too loud too early, thus squeezing his room for manoeuvre – it’s a widespread mistake, caused partly by eagerness outweighing technical prowess, partly by the limitations of an untrained voice and partly by the widely-held fallacy that volume is the only way to convey intensity. This error notwithstanding – and he covers it very well – he is greeted with an outstanding 19 seconds of applause.
  • 2:58 triad – Nelson, Wellington, Churchill
  • 3:25 another triad
  • 3:47 he sets the stage for quoting the SAS motto – and then delivers it.
  • 3:57 the audience goes berserk and, though he has sat down, they are on their feet and forcing him repeatedly to return to his feet to acknowledge their adulation.

I said earlier that I would return to highlighting a conspicuous success staring us in the face (pun intended). I had never seen this speech till I searched on YouTube; but I knew that if it were there I’d find it in seconds. I was right. I searched “Portillo who dares wins” and there it was. He had given the speech a FACE.

More than a decade before it was written he obeyed all three of the cardinal rules in The Face & Tripod in addition to several others of its strictures. This shows that there’s nothing particularly revolutionary about my book: it merely lays out time-tested simple but effective principles that will get anyone at least up to the competent 80% mark.

He appropriated his FACE from the SAS, but so what? JFK stole “Ask not what your country can do for you…&c” from Epictetus. I have the same attitude to this sort of plagiarism as the late, great, sainted Tom Lehrer – just remember why the good Lord made your eyes, and plagiarise.

Mostly with these speeches I prefer not to comment upon the sentiments expressed: my brief is to comment upon how well they are delivered. There’s a saying, popular in investors’ circles, that the market is never wrong. His audience was his market.

Go figure.

www.auracle.co.uk

2011 Party Conferences, Part 2: Miliband and Cameron. October ’11 Auracle Newsletter

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In the October newsletter I did analyses of conference speeches by the leaders of UKIP and the LibDems. This month I shall to do the same for Labour and Conservative. Chronology having caused the two biggest guns to have delivered last, I knew that these would be the ones subjected to the greatest pressure.

For various reasons I had seen neither speech live; so I was looking forward to settling down with pen and pad in front of the screen. In the event I found it impossible to sit all the way through either of them.

Ed Miliband
While he was making this speech Tweets were pouring into my BlackBerry from his political friends and foes; and they were universally scathing. As usual I treated these criticisms with a pinch of salt; because as a rule others don’t look where I am looking. It wasn’t going to be as bad as they claimed. Was it?

Within minutes of my watching the YouTube posting I had dropped both pen and pad, had covered my face with my hands and was viewing the screen between clenched fingers. The ultra-schmaltzy opening, directed at his wife, was emetic not just because it was ultra-schmaltzy but because there was nothing against which to balance it. Schmaltz can work only with a counter-weight of something very tough or the audience is left (as in this case) with just a sickly puddle of emotional soup. The worst of the schmaltz gave way to some humour on the subject of his nose-job. A bit of human-interest Nice-to-Know material (see the Chapter in The Face & Tripod) is quite a good idea, and the punch-line was quite funny so I began to hope that when he cut to the chase things would look up.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the political angle – that is not the brief I set myself – but it is supremely lame and a waste of everyone’s time, merely to catalogue what you see as shortcomings in the administration without recommending how to put them right. Imagine a member of your team delivering a presentation to you and doing that. This, even more than the opening schmaltz, was what put my hands over my face. This also was what eventually caused me to stab the ‘off’ button: I couldn’t take any more.

The last quality we should seek in a political leader is film-star attractiveness. Yes I know that the electorate, led by the media, too easily treats elections as a pantomime audition (and accordingly Britain was run for around a decade by Buttons – followed by Baron Hard-up) but to counter this tendency it makes it all the more important for political speeches to be of the highest standard. This wasn’t.  Miliband looks and sounds a little weird, so he needs to deliver strong arguments with transparent passion. He tried, but failed. He also needs basic platform savvy to stop himself repeatedly hitting the microphone with his gestures. If any of you had delivered this speech in the more testing environment of a business setting the audience would have sent you packing. I turned to Cameron, hoping for better.

David Cameron in four parts – Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3,  Part 4

I remember when Press pre-releases were embargoed. This speech, whether by accident or design, road-tested itself by pre-release. The Today programme buzzed with how the PM was going to tell us all to pay off our credit cards. Comments were passed by usual-suspect Radio 4 punditry; and the 6 o’clock news that evening informed us that that bit had been dropped. Were it so easy for the rest of us!  It isn’t, hence Cardinal 2 in The Face & Tripod.

He began with a very strong opening sentence, uncompromising to a fault. My hopes soared. He followed with an anaphora repetition – “ I’m proud of my…” with the last of the series delivered straight down the lens of the camera, “… and I’m proud of you.” My hopes sank. That wasn’t schmaltzy: that was oily. He paused for applause, and the audience – no doubt as stunned as I – failed to oblige. What possessed him to do something so creepy?

I have to keep reminding myself that these people have armies of consultants advising them on every eyebrow twitch. Why else would Cameron have acquired this curious thin-lipped grimace which he now affects, as if to project a ‘don’t mess with me’ image? It looks to me so phoney that I have trouble focussing instead on what he is saying; which sometimes is a pity because sometimes it is good.

But, as with Miliband, I found myself wondering whether this speech would have survived in a business environment. And the resounding answer was, no.

I recently engaged in an argument with a friend who disputed my claim that business speaking was more exacting than its political equivalent. He pointed to the myriad pressures that govern what and how politicians have to speak. He opined that where business speaking is fuelled by conviction, political speaking fakes conviction – and doing that successfully is a considerable skill. It’s a seductive case, because it assumes that all a business speaker needs is truth and sincerity. However we all know that occasions arise, in business as much as in politics, when your view of a broader picture than your audience can see will force you to aim slightly to one side of the truth. And your audience is invariably harder-nosed, more cynical and less easily duped than most of the millions of voters on the other side of the politician’s TV camera. If you find yourself having to fake sincerity, you’d better be a damn sight better at it than those guys above! In my training I try to avoid dispensing phoney cosmetic veneers, not because I am a starry-eyed optimist but because I’m a steely-eyed pessimist concerning the chances of pulling it off with the audiences of the niche in which I work. (It is perfectly possible to be genuinely sincere, aiming to one side of the truth, but that’s a long story.)

If you can bear to watch some of the footage of those two lamentable speeches, look hard when the camera gives you close-up shots of party grandees. How often do you see from them a genuine laugh, a truly thoughtful nod or applause that is more than dutiful? Very seldom. But when you do, that is when the speaker has swayed an audience as unforgiving as your average business audience.