Gordon Brown's book of speeches

On 1st April, I recorded my surprise that a publisher had (a) thought it worth publishing a 300 page book of Gordon Brown's speeches The Change we Choose: Speeches 2007-2009 and (b) decided to publish it on April Fools Day (HERE).

So I suppose I shouldn't really have been quite as surprised as I was by the news of of how many copies of the said book have been sold since then, as revealed in this week's Private Eye - which reports that it 'has sold a grand total of 31 - yes thirty two - copies' (Private Eye,1268, p. 25).

Bad news, perhaps, for publishers still competing to sign up any remaining memoirs by former Labour cabinet ministers - but very good news for less well-known authors like me, who can take heart from the knowledge that, compared with Mr Brown's latest tome, our own books have all been outstanding best-sellers!



Davos Meets Glastonbury: The UK Speechwriters’ Guild Conference

The world’s top speechwriters and thought leaders will gather in Bournemouth, UK, for a day of speeches and socialising on Friday 17 September, 2010.

The Second ‘Leadership & Communication’ Conference organised by the UK Speechwriters’ Guild will focus on the theme, How do leaders deliver the good news and the bad?

“Speechwriting is a misunderstood role. Many people think that the fact that a politician uses a speechwriter is just another example of their deviousness.” says Guild organiser, Brian Jenner.

“Appointing a speechwriter helps you find clarity, where often there is none. Journalists have sub-editors, authors have agents, speakers need speechwriters.

“Also, every organisation needs a story. Once you’ve got the core story right, every other communication springs from that. So you can’t Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or write compelling e-newsletters until you know what you’re about, and what you’re trying to do. That’s why the in-house speechwriter is becoming more and more common.”

SPEAKERS
This year’s speakers include Jeff Shesol, (former Clinton speechwriter), Edward Mortimer (former speechwriter to Kofi Annan), Martin Broughton, (Chairman of British Airways, Winner of the UKSG Business Communicator of the Year 2010), Max Atkinson (former speechwriter to Lord Ashdown and author of Lend Me Your Ears). Phil Collins (former speechwriter to Tony Blair) and Charles Crawford (Former Foreign Office Diplomat) and Hugo Summerson (former MP).

GROUP SESSIONS
The day will also include an expert training session in smaller groups. The price is £168 for the day including a buffet lunch and refreshments. You can find out more HERE - or contact Brian Jenner direct for more details:

Tel +44 (0)1202 551257
Mob +44 (0)7976 720705

Memoirs, bloody memoirs!

In the light of recent controversies surrounding Lord Mandelson's memoirs, and in anticipation of Tony Blair's forthcoming tome, it's worth rewatching Jim Hacker's reaction to his predecessor's literary efforts - and how the matter was resolved:

Can Labour afford to back the Ed Milibandwagon?

A special welcome to those of you who've come via the first ever link here from the Left Foot Forward blog. I hope you won't be too disappointed to discover that the words 'dangerous' and 'trot' are nowhere to be found in what follows. And, if this is your first visit, I very much hope that you'll browse around some of the other posts, to which a complete list of links can be found under 'COMPLETE BLOGPOST INDEX' on the left. If you do, you'll see that the blog seeks to be 'non-aligned' and you don't have to go far to find positive and negative comments about members of all the main political parties. The main focus is on analysing and commenting on speech-making, presentation and communication, often using short video clips to illustrate the points being made.

Listening to Ed Miliband denouncing New Labour in an interview on today's World at One (BBC Radio 4) reminded of something I wrote six years ago, when the said Miliband was one of the Brownites who was busily briefing against Tony Blair.

Under the title Can Labour Afford to Back Brown? the first few paragraphs went as follows:

1979 Revisited?
"On the day after the 1979 general election, I remember being flabbergasted by a letter to 'The Guardian' that seemed completely out of touch with reality. Signed by Tony Benn and a group of like-minded colleagues, it attributed Labour’s defeat entirely to the fact that it had failed to pursue policies that were left-wing enough. The authors conveniently ignored the fact that the Callaghan government had only managed to stay in power because of a pact with the Liberals. And they were undaunted by the complete lack of evidence of any widespread support for left-wing policies from an electorate that had just voted Margaret Thatcher into office.

"With the price of ignoring the preferences of the electorate as high as eighteen years in opposition, the party ought surely to have learnt its lesson. But calls from Labour malcontents to replace Blair with Brown are beginning to sound like the first drum beats of a renewed retreat from political reality. It’s not just that the anti-Blair agitators have apparently forgotten that bickering and division are a sure-fire recipe for damaging a party’s fortunes. They also seem to be assuming that the electorate would be happier, or at least just as happy, with Brown at the helm as they are with Blair.

"What harks back so resonantly to 1979 is the fact that the change being pressed for by the siren voices within the party once again seem to have more to do with internal party feuds than any rational assessment of Labour’s wider electoral appeal" ... (continued HERE).

1979 Revisited again?
Now that Ed Miliband has won the backing of the big unions, whose support Ed Balls had been hoping for, the question is: can Labour afford to back Ed Miliband on his journey back to 1979 and the wonderful world of old Labour?

And, in case you think I'm being a bit alarmist, try this sample from one of the video clips posted yesterday:



Although I know nothing at all about his mother's values, I do know that his father, the late Ralph Miliband, was a militant Marxist and a highly influential member of a generation of sociological theorists who (in my opinion) contributed towards undermining the credibility of a once respectable discipline and, more indirectly, towards the Labour Party's disastrous lurch to the left in the early 1980s.

I also know that, if I were Labour Party member hoping for better things to come, I wouldn't be putting my money on a leader so willing to associate himself with the Marxist values of his father.

Nor would I take too much heart from the following clips from a video posted on the candidate's own website.

Down with New Labour and down with markets!


Time to turn the page (backwards?)


The discontinuity candidate?



Too young to remember?
The problem is that Ed Miliband is too young to remember what happened to the Labour Party during the 18 years of decline and recovery between 1979 and 1997. He was only 9 when Margaret Thatcher came to power and 13 when Foot led Labour to the disastrous defeat of 1983.

So let me remind him and his supporters of a few rather important facts:
  1. In 1980, Labour turned its back on the moderate Denis Healey and elected left-winger Michael Foot as party leader.
  2. In 1981, left-winger Tony Benn came within 0.8% of ousting Denis Healey as deputy leader.
  3. In 1981, four senior former Labour cabinet ministers broke away from Labour to form the Social Democratic Party.
  4. Labour's 1983 election manifesto, described by Gerald Kaufman as 'the longest suicide note in history', included withdrawal from the Common Market and unilateral nuclear disarmament.
  5. At the 1983 general election, Labour's popular vote was only 2% ahead of the combined vote for the SDP and the Liberal Party.
  6. Had the SDP not attracted so many 'moderate' Labour voters in 1983 and 1987, subsequent Labour leaders would not have been forced to move their party towards the centre.
  7. In 1995, Labour removed Clause IV from its party constitution (the commitment to 'the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange') - the official birth of New Labour.
  8. Blair and Brown worked very hard in opposition to win the confidence of business, the City and middle class voters before Labour's general election victory in 1997.
Old Labour today = defeat tomorrow
In short, however much the likes of Ed Miliband may want to consign New Labour to the past, they should remember that their party would never have won one, let alone three consecutive elections without the broader centrist approach and appeal established by New Labour.

And, as I suggested when I warned that Brown would be an electoral disaster, the party is unlikely ever to win again without a leader who can communicate effectively with a much broader swathe of voters than those represented by the trades unions and the traditional Labour 'core vote' - to whom Miliband the younger is appealing for his mandate to put the clock back.

But to some of us of a certain age, it sounds like a retreat from political reality' that's at least as flabbergasting as the one led by Tony Benn and his left-wing chums back in 1979.

Another chance to compare the Labour leadership candidates' communication skills

Last week, I posted Laura Kuenssberg's BBC interviews with each of the Labour Leadership candidates HERE.

The Party has also posted a series of videos on YouTybe, with the candidates standing in front of the same backdrop answering the same questions.

So here's another chance to compare their communication skills - and/or to tease out their coded messages about where they really stand on the past, present and future of the Labour Party. I confess to having spotted one or two interesting observations about Ed Miliband - so expect another post on that particular subject in the next few days.

Meanwhile, and in the interests of preserving neutrality, they are presented here in descending order of height (for reasons explained HERE), with the Miliband brothers (top equal at 5' 11") in alphabetical order:





Listen with Mother Mandy: monarch-maker, Maggie-mimic or megalomaniac?

In case you're being distracted by the reviews of Lord Mandelson's memoirs that are still spewing out into the press and the blogosphere, spare a moment to watch tw0 extraordinary self-advertisements from the man himself.

Just in case you're näive enough to have thought that there might have been one or two other Labour MPs (not to mention back-room advisors like Philip Gould) who might have played a part in devising the 'New Labour' project, Mandelspin informs us that Blair and Brown "wouldn't have been in power without a third man" (i.e. him - 10 seconds in).



Taking a tip from Margaret Thatcher?
Mandelspin's willingness to revel in his 'Prince of Darkness' image must make him the first politician to adopt and exploit a nickname since Margaret Thatcher borrowed 'the iron lady' from the Russians to refer to herself.

He mentions it again in this next advert - for which I can only assume that he was coached by Rory Bremner:



Former MP puts Horse Manure House on the market for £1.5 million

In various posts since the parliamentary expenses row broke, I've reported on the fortune(s) of David Heathcote-Amory, former MP for the constituency in which I live and vote:
Having lost the seat he'd held for 27 years, he's put his modest little second home (above) on the market, details of which are available HERE.

As you'd expect from a property on which so much taxpayers' money had been lavished (see below), the house and garden are, as the full brochure explains, in immaculate condition.

somerset_set

Will former MP's home get your vote?

The "horse manure" house and garden that contributed to the downfall of mid-Somerset's longest-serving MP are up for sale.

David Heathcoat-Amory had been the Wells constituency MP from 1983 until this year's General Election.

He was one of the MPs dragged into last year's parliamentary expenses scandal when the Daily Telegraphrevealed the individual receipts and invoices of MPs.

His expenses bills for his Pilton home made it on to the front page – especially the revelation he had charged the taxpayer for 550 sacks of horse manure – part of the £5,877 bill he submitted to parliament for gardening, £3,173 for food and £2,371 for cleaning the Pilton home in the previous year.

The House of Commons expense review, headed by Sir Thomas Legg, ordered Mr Heathcoat-Amory to pay back £29,691.93 of tax-payers' money wrongly given.

Critics claim that it was the publicity over the expenses that cost Mr Heathcoat-Amory his seat earlier this year.

Mr Heathcoat-Amory has decided not to stand again for parliament at Wells and with the loss of his £64,766 parliamentary salary, the Pilton home that was the subject of such controversy is suddenly surplus to requirements.

Mr Heathcoat-Amory, and his family, use their London home as their main residence and he no longer has reason to travel to and stay regularly in mid-Somerset.

So Beales House, Pilton, has gone on the market with Wells estate agents Carter Jonas, with a price tag of £1.5 million.

Mr Heathcoat-Amory said: "Yes, I am selling the house, it has always been my second home."

The particulars for Beales House reveal many of the features for which the upkeep, up until the expenses row, taxpayers had helped to fund: £10,000 was claimed over four years for gardening alone.

Special mention is given by the agents to the "well-established gardens and grounds with an extensive range of plants", a small waterfall and a croquet lawn.

Many of the invoices submitted for tax-payers to pay for over the last four years were for mowing and watering and Mr Heathcoat-Amory once submitted a bill of more than £50 for a spring weed-and-feed treatment, moss killer and herbicide to his lawn.

Similarly the house, according to the agents, has been "carefully maintained and extended by the owners", with the "most recent addition" of a garden room.

Prospective buyers can be reassured that Mr Heathcoat-Amory's expenses claims would appear to back that up: one bill was submitted for £363.43 of damage caused by squirrels to the electrics in his loft, and by mice in the kitchen roof.

The house has three reception rooms and five bedrooms and anyone thinking of purchasing the property will have to consider the cost of heating such a large property: a £986.17 bill for heating oil was submitted to parliament in January 2008. An earlier claim totalled £858.

Much is made of the kitchen, which includes a built-in larder/wine store, which perhaps helped to house much of the £3,173-worth of food purchased by Mr Heathcoat-Amory and charged to tax-payers in one year.

There is also a range of outbuildings, including an artist's studio house in the old groom's quarters.

Asked by a reporter if he had any thoughts on leaving Pilton, Mr Heathcoat-Amory said: "I don't really have any. It is just one of those things."