THESE VITAL SPEECHES

16
CICERO SPEECHWRITING AWARDS
You can’t always find it.
You won’t always find it.
But, on this occasion, find it I did.
He didn’t disappoint either.
At least not for the first three and a
half paragraphs.
Then he was side-tracked, ambushed
by Government back-benchers.
He never recovered the plot nor
indeed the speech.
Ten minutes evaporated into nothing.
The debate came and went.
The Bill was defeated.
Robin must have been gutted, if not
entirely surprised.
He knew he didn’t have Government
support.
How was it for me?
It was exhilarating but execrable.
It was diabolical but divine.
It was heaven but hell.
I was hooked.
As Lewis Carroll said—
“No good fish goes anywhere without
a porpoise.”
And you might call this thing rhetoric,
but where I work—in the parliamentary
sphere—rhetoric has rather a
bad press.
It’s a pejorative.
A music hall double act.
It’s Hooey & Guff.
It’s Hog & Wash.
It’s Flap & Doodle.
It’s Balder & Dash.
A euphemism for BS.
Like Stan & Olly—
“Well, here’s another fine mess … ”
Not that this is a recent development.
I consulted Ambrose Bierce’s The
Devil’s Dictionary.
And before disappearing a century
ago into the smoke and gunfire of the
Mexican revolution, he defined oratory
thus—
“A conspiracy between speech and
action to cheat the understanding.”
But look closely and you can’t help
but see the critics of rhetoric using
rhetoric in order to decry others for
using rhetoric.
Don’t you just love rhetoric!
Another quote of the musical
kind—
“Frank’s got to be on your mind …
He had this ability to get inside of the
song in a sort of a conversational way.
Frank sang to you—not at you.”
So said Dylan of Sinatra.
We can apply that lesson, even if
we’re not tackling the great American
songbook.
Great speechwriting?
It should be poetic.
It should be mellifluous.
It should be the music of words.
It should be aimed at your head and
your heart and your gut.
Good speechwriting?
It should have what Steven Pinker
calls “the egalitarian give and take of
conversation”.
A speech isn’t an essay or a policy
document.
A speech isn’t the time for a tonne
of technical detail.
A speech isn’t an instruction manual
for your washing machine.
A speech isn’t made up of 74-word
sentences.
Which, let me say, is at least 59
words too long.
A speech says more with less.
A speech has a heartbeat.
A speech tells a story.
A speech is made of the simplest
ingredients.
Voice, audience, words.
We’re back to Frank.
And the genius of the Hoboken
Hoodlum, remember, was to talk to
you, not at you.
Respect the audience and chances
are they’ll respect you right back.
Okay, the worst thing a speechwriter
can do …
Are your minds a-boggle?
Mine is and I know the answer.
Here’s the charge sheet.
It’s not setting down a busy paragraph
so the senior politician you’re
writing for overlooks a crucial full stop.
Thereby elevating a former deputy
leader of the Scottish Tories to the
position of First Minister.
A surprise not only to the former
deputy leader but to the speaker herself
and to the rest of the room.
It’s not that.
It’s not using a Superman motif for
a former stand-in leader of the Scottish
Labour party.
Before finding out she suffers from
a curious and confoundedly obscure
condition—a fear of superheroes.
Which is why only 10% of the
speech is used.
The good 10% though.
The 10% covered by the media the
next day.
It’s not that.
It’s not deploying a record-breaking
number of excrement-related puns
during a debate of the Dog Fouling
(Scotland) Bill.
Having the MSP in charge of the
Bill refer to himself as Mr “Keech”
Harding.
And discovering that one of his
more mischievous colleagues has
placed a plastic dog turd on every
MSP’s seat.
It’s not that.
No, the worst thing a speechwriter
can do is easy to overcome but difficult
to avoid.
You can hear the results in any
council chamber, at AGMs, during
wedding receptions, for retirement dos,
and, yes, even from lecture halls.
And that thing is to write a dull
speech.
Because had Moses taken the time
to turn over that tablet, he’d have
found an 11th commandment—
Love thy audience.
Which means never inflict on others
a speech you would not yourself wish
to hear.
It’s not the job of the speechwriter
to send them up the wooden hill to
Bedfordshire.
Surely it must be an offence under
Scots law or breach of the European
Convention on Human Rights to bore
the listener?
I’m in a room-full of learned types
here—help me out!
And it would be so easy to remedy—this
endless ennui.
How?
Simply by writing like a human being
for others of the species.
And not being afraid to delve into
the toolbox of rhetoric.
The one we borrowed from next
door and haven’t quite got round to
returning.
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