ANOTHER VOICE
Brevity or silence: the new code for safe speech
CHARLES MOORE
If, like Michael Portillo, you are one of
those public figures who worry that there are too many people running down this country, what should you do about it? The first, simplest thing would be not to give any interviews.
In the years of Britain's greatest success in parliamentary government, the chief form of political communication was parlia- mentary debate. The education which most MPs received prepared them for this. At school and university they learnt to declaim long passages of Greek, Latin and English by heart. They were taught the history of debates in the Athenian assembly and the Roman senate. They read Cicero; they studied Aristotle on rhetoric. In their recre- ations they practised the skills acquired. In school debating societies and in the Oxford and Cambridge Unions they imitated the form of grown-up parliaments. They did not debate the content of the politics cur- rent at the time — this was usually forbid- den until the 20th century, and when Glad- stone, as prime minister, went to address the boys at Eton, his subject was Homer but they did something which stood them in much better stead: they learnt the rules of the game and the effective use of words.
Even today, most politicians have this skill, if in debased form. Messrs Hurd and Clarke and Howard and Gummer all acquired it at Cambridge. Much of the Labour front bench learnt it at the Scottish universities. They all practise it competent- ly. But it is an inadequate training for three-quarters of the public appearances demanded of the modern politician.
The modern politician is interviewed and interviewed and interviewed until he literal- ly does not know what is happening to him. On the Sunday before he became Prime Minister, I interviewed Mr Major in No 11 Downing Street. I was one of a long queue. Each of us had half an hour. When my turn came Mr Norman Lamont (Ifs sons passes, ces beaux fours!) ushered me in and Mr Major shook my hand and smiled. Then he went to the lavatory. As soon as he returned, he shook my hand again and said, `How do you do?' It was hardly surprising that this exhausted and bewildered man was unable to give very enticing copy for the readers of the Daily Telegraph.
And even when the interviewers do not come quite so thick and fast, they still give very little advantage to the person inter- viewed. The aims of the questioner and the questioned are incompatible. The first one wants something new and controversial, the second wants to persuade the public that his view is right. The questioner gets his kudos from catching out the questioned.
The questioned gets his from seeing off the questioner. Ninety per cent of the time the interviewer wins, because the battle has taken place on his ground and his terms. The only way for politicians to cut Jeremy Paxman or John Humphrys down to size would be to force them to answer questions in the House of Commons.
The cumulative effect of the interview is therefore to discredit public figures, which in turn discredits the institutions they rep- resent. The politician only really succeeds in an interview when his aim is malicious: he can do down a colleague far more suc- cessfully than he can talk up a policy. The public come to believe that he is interested only in malice, which is generally unfair and untrue. They barely listen to the defence of the policy. Television interviewers make it even worse because there you look at the man and scarcely listen at all. He is almost bound to be too fat or too thin, too pale or too red, too sleek or too scruffy. The late Nicholas Ridley, who in real life was amus- ing and good-looking, looked mad on tele- vision. His spectacles obscured his eyes, his tongue darted constantly across his lips and his voice rasped. No interview did him any good. One, though not, admittedly, on tele- vision, did him in. Even very well informed people base their judgment of public fig- ures on little details about their appear- ance, manner or habits of speech. The way Gordon Brown's lower lip pulls in at the end of each sentence seems to have turned half the nation against him. The same applies to Mr Major's inability to pro- nounce the word `want'. What they all need is to have their voices spoken by an actor, a privilege only accorded, at present, to Gerry Adams.
It is not only politicians. We have learned, too late, that interviews are bad for the monarchy. People have long known that the royal family is not chiefly remark- able for its intellectual attainments. They have not, on the whole, minded this; indeed, it has often been a source of per- verse pride. But to know it in a general sort of way is one thing and to see it displayed on particular occasions is another. It is no accident that it has always been considered a breach of etiquette to ask a royal person- age a question: there is the ever-present danger that you will get a silly answer. The Queen and Queen mother retain their prestige because no one has ever dared ask them, 'How do you feel about . . . ?' or `What's your reaction to . . . ?' anything that happens to be in the headlines that morning.
The younger royal generation have not been so fortunate. They retain the royal inhibition that they must be polite at all times, but there appears to be no reciprocal obligation upon those who talk to them. So almost every interview is a set-up in which the interviewer is looking for Andrew's/Edward's/Fergie's/Diana's amaz- ing gaffe or confession. It seems that the Prince of Wales has been well received in Australia, and he did his cause a great deal of good by his coolness when someone fired blanks at him, but did it improve the shining hour to talk about it in an inter- view? Why was he able to cope with the attack? someone asked. `A thousand years of breeding,' he replied. In England some will recognise this as an example of that phenomenon still in use here but soon to be challenged in the European Court of Human Rights — a joke — but how many others will? How many angry denunciations can we expect of the implied suggestion that people with no breeding at all would not be so brave, how many medical articles to show that courage is not genetic, how many pieces by brilliant commentators on the Australian scene criticising the insensi- tivity' of the remark? Surely the Prince's actions spoke louder than any words and should have been left to do so.
Can people stop giving interviews, then? Could public figures restrict themselves to formal speeches, debates and statements, letters for publication and articles in the better class of newspaper? That, by and large, is what happens with the few institu- tions which are still respected. Serving army officers, senior consultants, High Court judges and so forth are rarely found on breakfast television, and if they were we would soon despise them just as much as everyone else. But I don't suppose famous people will stop talking. The heresy has got abroad that people are interesting for what they `really' are, rather than as displayed in what they do. That is what is weakening our institutions, and no one has the power to stop it. That being so, Mr Patten will have to include interview technique in the National Curriculum.
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