Please Baroness, just talk like a human being

The moment the Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, was fined £5,000 for employing a housekeeper who was not legally allowed to work in the UK, three things were inevitable:

1. The media would give the story a disproportionate amount of attention.
2. The opposition parties would make as much hay from the matter as was humanly possible.
3. The response from the government and the Attorney General herself would be utterly feeble.

The story indeed dominated the BBC News for much of Wednesday, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have called for Baroness Scotland to resign, and the responses from the government and the Baroness  herself have, once again, made it appear that Gordon Brown’s government only speaks English as a distinctly remote foreign language.

Here is the Baroness being interviewed by a BBC reporter.

Let’s start with what she said. My brackets are what a normal human being, rather than a politician, would have said.

“There’s no suggestion at all that I employed someone knowing them to be illegal.” (“I didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to work here.”)

“But what I did not do, is that I didn’t copy the documents and retain them.” (“I didn’t keep copies of the documents.”)

“I have apologised for that wholeheartedly.” (“I’m sorry.”)

“I think that I absolutely accept that I should have photocopied the documents…That was a flaw.” (“It was a big mistake.”)

I’m not entirely sure how someone can think that they absolutely accept something – a wonderful example of politician nonsense speak. It is a vice that female politicians seem particularly guilty of – Harriet Harman, Theresa May, Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith all speak in this grossly contorted way far too often. Of course it has been suggested that women may be genetically pre-programmed to be better communicators than men, so we may notice it more when they fail. (If you’re interested, read Simon Baron Cohen’s terrific book on the difference between male and female brains.) But, male or female, if you use obfuscatory language, you will only sound as if you want to obfuscate and have something to hide. Keep it simple.

“I think we need to be very clear,” Baroness Scotland says. This is a phrase I hear time and again from government minsters (and most of all from the PM himself). It makes me want to tear out what little is left of my hair. I tell my communications training clients all the time that if the opposite of something is gibberish then it’s not worth saying. No-one would ever say “I think we need to be very unclear”, so the original phrase is clearly nonsense.

I cannot for the life of me believe that Baroness Scotland talks to her colleagues, friends or family in the way she talks to the reporter here. She speaks in a totally flat monotone, there is no rise or fall to her voice and no use of pause, cadence or variation in tone (Thatcher used to do this of course, to stop the interviewer interrupting her). The effect is numbingly robotic. No-one is going to sympathise with her or believe a word she says. The irony is that it’s all easily fixable – most of the time I don’t train people to do something, I ‘untrain’ them out of their bad habits. This is often a much easier task as I’m returning someone to something more natural, rather than training them in something unusual.

In Clear and Present Danger, the brilliant 1994 political-action film, Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan offers the President some advice when a close friend is caught in a drug smuggling operation. “Don’t play it down. Play it up. If they say you were close friends, say no, you were lifelong friends. Don’t give them anywhere to go.” It’s great advice for anyone attracting criticism, and how I wish politicians would heed it.

Here’s what Baroness Scotland, instead of blathering on about it being a ‘technical breach’, should have said: “It was a really stupid thing to do, a terrible oversight…I’m the minister who wrote the legislation so I should have known so much better, I’m incredibly embarrassed…if I were Gordon Brown I would be pretty angry with me right now.”

Why can’t politicians talk like human beings? How much easier life could be for them if they did.

No-one is more guilty of this than Gordon Brown himself. He communicates in a way that only emphasises and enhances his stereotype of someone remote, disconnected and unable to speak simple truths. I would ban the Prime Minister from saying “I do say to you…” and “look” and “I think you’ll find”. No normal person talks like this. Can you imagine asking someone directions in the street and them saying “look, I do say to you that I think you’ll find it’s first on the left”? You would think they were mad.

The PM’s other major problem is that he seems unable to answer a straight question (something David Cameron has repeatedly pointed out with enormous glee at Prime Minister’s Questions, again feeding the stereotype). Even in this interview on American television with NBC’s Brian Williams, when the PM is asked if he has any doubts that David Cameron is capable of the job of Prime Minister, Gordon Brown evades, and seems incapable of a straight answer. What a great question this is! A gift. But did Gordon Brown begin his answer with the words “yes, I have many doubts…” Of course he didn’t. He waffled around, and ended up sounding like he was giving some strange endorsement of David Cameron. More on Gordon Brown soon. But, in the meantime, if anyone can explain why a simple “yes” wasn’t the right answer to this question, I would love to know.

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