You may have read that Gordon Brown refused to answer a question during a recent web-chat.
The question deemed unsuitable for an answer?
“What is your favourite biscuit?”
Quite why the Prime Minister couldn’t or wouldn’t answer this is beyond me. Yet again, Gordon Brown reinforced the idea that he is evasive and incapable of delivering a straight answer to a simple question. An idea which David Cameron mines to great effect.
Can anyone tell me how any biscuit he might have mentioned could have caused any sort of issue?! It’s hard to imagine anything, short of it emerging that Hitler also liked a KitKat with his tea, that would have generated the same volume of negative media comment. Alastair Campbell has blogged one possible explanation – that the PM didn’t want to be dragged into dealing with trivia rather than discussing more pressing issues. I don’t buy this. In a situation like this, answer the question in a few words and then move on. If asked more trivial questions, it is then perfectly reasonable to move the discussion on to something more significant.
I was reminded yesterday of the importance and power of straight talking and how honest, clear, simple answers to questions can defuse situations rapidly.
In my local yoga studio I saw a woman charge up to the Manager and demand, with bulging eyes and indignation written all over her face, to know when the two broken showers were going to be fixed.
“Tonight,” the Manager replied softly, with glorious one-word simplicity.
The woman’s eyes stopped bulging and her fury turned to meek acquiescence. She looked positively guilty for her aggression and sloped off.
Biscuits or showers, budget deficits or Afghanistan, just answer the question. If yoga studio managers can do it then why can’t politicians?
My blog on Baroness Scotland addresses similar themes.
Neatly proving my point, David Cameron brought up the biscuit issue in today’s Prime Minister’s Questions in a discussion about Royal Mail.
“…a Prime Minister who cannot give a straight answer…unable to decide what biscuits he wants to eat.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8318324.stm
As much as Cameron’s approach may seem trivial and clichéd, it is the sort of thing that hits home with voters. Brown should have attacked him for focussing on something as trivial as biscuits however. But the PM does one thing right with his response – a terrific use of lists. Lists are a powerful and effective rhetorical device exploited to excellent effect here. Still, must do better…
How absolutely right you are. In all my years as a journalist it has never ceased to amaze me how people create huge problems for themselves by refusing to answer questions. They end up looking guilty, ignorant, shifty, bad-tempered or paranoid by appearing to see some enormous booby-trap that only a deranged mind could visualise. Why are so many people so terrified of answering a question? And it all ended in the necessity for a major intervention from the govt Press Office to announce grandly that he was now deigning to tell us that he favoured biscuits with chocolate on.