Ed
Milliband almost let me down this week. The reason for this had nothing to do
with the contents of his speech, but everything to do with the fact that it
seemed to come as a surprise to every journalist and political commentator
wheeled out to talk about it afterwards.
Until his
speech I’d been getting wound up to the point of blogging about how nothing in
politics comes as a surprise any more. Every speech, be it to a conference or
Parliament, is preceeded by a news story beginning with the words ‘in a speech
today x is expected to say...’
If you
haven’t noticed this just google the words ‘expected to say that’and over
several pages you’ll find a dazzling array of examples including‘Danny Alexander
is expected to say “Fair taxes in tough times means
everyone playing by the same rule book,’ ‘ Yvette Cooper is expected
to say: "Look at the Libor scandal that emerged this summer. It is a
multibillion pound fraud,’ and ‘George Osborne is expected to say that he’s never ate a pasty in his life, but did once
have a sausage roll and understands the dietary issues that face the working
class.’
All of a
sudden, Milliband appeared to have bucked the trend, and I lost the chance to
moan, but then I came across this on the ITN website “In a highly personal keynote speech
to the Labour conference, Mr Miliband will draw on his own memories of
attending a comprehensive school in north London, and speak of classmates
failed by the education system because they were not suited to academic exams
and university.” Normal service was resumed.
Why this irritates me so much is that it’s another
example of a world where people are so impatient that they can’t wait for an
event itself, and everything has to be trailed in advance. For example, unlike
any other person ever to sing a Bond theme, Adele cannot wait until the
official announcement, she has to tweet about it to a world who also don’t want
to wait four days till something that we all knew anyway is finally made
public. Newspapers do the same. The Guardian a few weeks ago had at least two
‘stories’ that were little more than teasers for interviews elsewhere in the
paper. One was with JK Rowling, and the other was, once again, Danny Alexander.
Is there such a lack of real stories that papers have to make quotes from their
own interviews into separate articles? Just take some pages out rather than
repeat the same thing twice.
This trend for sneak previews began with TV, and the same
nervous executives with attention deficit disorders
that decided we couldn’t be trusted to tune in on two seperate weeks for a
mini-series, we had to watch on consecutive nights in case we lost all interest
and forgot about it. They then decided that even if a programme was on the next
night, we might still not tune in if we didn’t have some idea about what was
coming, and as a result they gave us the twenty-second glimpse of the next
episode that is meant to give us a scene that we’ll be eagerly waiting for, but
actually destroys any of the suspense by showing us the hero will still be
alive, and the villain will strike again.
I can only assume that political advisers believe they have to satisfy
the same level of impatience and imagined anticipation when it comes to
political speeches, but political conferences are not rock gigs. Do they
imagine a whole conference, or nation, full of people sitting through a 90
minute long speech waiting for the words ‘Look at the Libor scandal’ to emerge,
just as they would wait for the opening bars of Mr Brightside to tell them
their favourite song is on the way at a Killers gig, or for the lights to focus
on the guitarist at a rock gig to tell them this is the long solo and it’s time
to go to the bar?
It doesn’t happen, and, with the exception of the power and style of
delivery that Milliband managed on Tuesday, it just means there are no real
surprises coming from the party conferences or any other political speech.
Maybe it’s ‘focus group’ politics taken to its logical end with every announcement
tested in advance for consumer satisfaction, so that any unpopular ones can be
quickly replaced with a sanitised family-friendly ending. I seem to remember
that this was what happened with David Cameron at last year’s Tory party
conference, where a controversial part of his speech was trailed and quickly
altered after it was clear that it was not popular. I tried to google this to
find out what the announcement was, but googling ‘David Cameron u-turn
announcement’ produced more results than ‘expected to say that,’ and
discovering this was where I decided to end this post.
In my next
post, I’m expected to say a lot more rubbish about anything that is getting on
my nerves. Bet that’s got your attention.
