Auntie’s hollow lessons in the art of public speaking

Rod Liddle

There’s a BBC television programme on at present called The Speaker in which teenagers are coached in the art of delivering a political speech. This is public service broadcasting based on the premise that we would prefer our young people to turn out like, say, Jacqui Smith or Tony McNulty rather than occupy themselves by selling drugs or stabbing one another in the throat.

That premise may be tottering a little at the moment; after all, the entrepreneurial tendencies of most drug dealers cost the taxpayer rather less, directly, than Jacqui’s or Tony’s well-publicised entrepreneurial tendencies. But still, one shouldn’t be cynical.

The BBC is a generous organisation, and very forgiving. It has chosen as a judge for this competition – and also a mentor for the young people – the man who almost destroyed the corporation and caused the resignation of its director-general and chairman: Alastair Campbell. Yes, the man whom the BBC believes can best inculcate the arts of noble political discourse to the nation’s teenagers is the former spin doctor at No 10. It is a little like putting a Sunday school class in the hands of Beelzebub.

On the programme’s website it is suggested that Al will be able to pass on all the crucial skills of political debating, “particularly how to lie through his teeth to journalists and colleagues, dissemble, obfuscate, stonewall, make stuff up and also how best to punch Peter Mandelson in a row over what trousers the prime minister should wear”. Actually it doesn’t say that, I made it up. Instead it says that Campbell “demonstrates the subtleties of persuasion”, which is almost as funny, in a way. Those famous Campbell subtleties in full, etc.

For Campbell I suspect that this is another step in the programme to rehabilitate himself to the status of normal human being after all those years of bludgeoning arrogance; look, here’s Al being nice to the kids.

Incidentally, the other judges are, as you would imagine from the BBC, impeccably weighted for their political views. There’s the left-wing spin doctor Al, the very left-wing comedian Jo Brand and the leftish pro-Obama gay black basketball player John Amaechi. But they are amply balanced by the fourth judge, an actor whose name I forget and who has no stated political views at all.

The interesting thing is that the kids do not sound like kids. They sound like automatons. Each of them churns out the same sort of blank, vapid drivel about how we really need change, change for the better, and to be fairer, and more caring, and nicer, and kinder, flopsy bunnies, flopsy bunnies. It all sounds very much like the 1997 Labour manifesto, in fact – pleasantly vacant aspirations. I feel bad about dissing the kids, but that’s how it sounded to me.

There’s a lot of worry about our political class at the moment. Politicians complain that we think they’re all on the make and devoid of principle when, in truth, they argue, it is only a minority of them who behave thus. But it doesn’t seem as if it is only a minority. I suspect that – those Commons expenses rows aside – there are two reasons for this.

The first is that they have become almost pointless, devoid of real political power, effectively emasculated by a presidential kind of politics which brooks no debate. And the second reason is that they themselves, with some honourable exceptions, are no longer motivated by ideological commitment. The two main parties have become pragmatic opportunists beholden to no conviction other than that they need to win the next election, or push a little further ahead in the opinion polls. So much is evident, even last week in the Budget statement and the response to it from the opposition, both of which seemed to me a rather desperate attempt at niche marketing. Where was the overriding principle?

So I suppose, given the way politics is right now, the teenagers have precisely the right mentor in Alastair Campbell. But I wonder if a young Winston Churchill or Nye Bevan would have got through the first round?

+ What is the connection between clown shoes, ice cream vans and the Bonjela gel which you rub onto mouth ulcers? They have all, this past week, fallen foul of our health and safety industry. First, Valerik Kashkin, a clown with the Moscow State Circus, now performing in Liverpool, was told he could no longer wear his (undoubtedly hilarious) outsized shoes because they represented a clear and present danger to himself. Larry Dewitt, the scouser health and safety seneschal who made the decision, said: “You have to take a common sense approach with these things. If it’s stupid, don’t do it.” Dead right, Larry – you wouldn’t want a clown to do anything stupid.

Meanwhile, there are calls to ban Bonjela because there may or may not be a link betwixt it and a rare illness, Reye’s Syndrome, which kills fewer than one in a million kids each year. No link has been established. And a school in Sheffield wants the local ice cream van to stay away in case children are tempted to buy an ice cream, which would lead to them keeling over from heart disease or becoming hyperactive and stabbing everyone. How much of the public debt might we save if we sacked Larry and the others and looked after ourselves for the next 20 years?

Beating death – and the bookies

There’s no better incentive for cheating death than hard cash. In 2006, Jon Matthews was told he was dying of cancer and should not “make any plans for Christmas”. So he went down the bookies and bet that he would outlive the doctor’s prediction – he’s already trousered £5,000, will win another £5,000 in a few weeks and is still going strong.

It reminds me of the wonderful story of Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who at the age of 90 sold her apartment to a 47-year-old lawyer who avidly agreed to pay her a monthly sum until her death, when the apartment would become his. But Mme. Calment lived to the world record age of 122. The lawyer died 21 months before her – having by then paid her twice the market value of the apartment.

Airline fat tax should take off

I have been trying to dredge up some sympathy for the people who are so grotesquely fat that Ryanair is thinking about charging them for two seats on their cheapo aeroplanes. I have not been successful. Too often I have been stuck in economy class wedged half underneath some morbidly obese, sweating flobber; after six hours of this sideways moist pressure, the lard-bucket’s flesh fuses with your own and you need a scalpel to extricate yourself and take refuge in the toilets for a cigarette.

If Ryanair could equip all adult passengers with red buttons that would eject nearby screaming children through the roof, along with their indulgent parents, I might be tempted to revise my long-held determination not to fly Ryanair ever – not even if I was in Islamabad airport and it was the last flight out.

+ Television is a fairly vile industry, don’t you think? Just watch again those gibbering, talent-free Geordie munchkins Ant and Dec, the smug perma-tanned grin of Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden’s sterile, plastic mug, collapse in faux astonishment on the inaptly named Britain’s Got Talent as the rather lovely Susan Boyle sings them a song – to the usual hysterical whoops from an audience with the collective IQ of a crayfish. Who, other than the likes of them, is thick enough to suppose that in order to sing a song very nicely you need to look like Victoria Beckham and be under the age of 30? Nobody.

The whole enterprise left me happy for Boyle, but aghast at the cynicism of the show and the crushing stupidity of its assumptions.