Ministerial speeches

At Wednesday's FRF dinner the Minister there, Jim Murphy, gave a relatively unscripted speech that came across, to me, as refreshingly honest and human.

In my past life within the Civil Service I occasionally wrote speeches for Ministers and heard a significant number; most were deadly dull with bullet point after bullet point justifying what we thought Government policy was at the time (we usually thought we had a better grasp on this than the Ministers themselves!). At one point, Ministers recognised the dull nature of the scripts that were being presented with and asked us to find jokes or anecdotes to open speeches; as though we had gone into the Civil Service to be gag writers!

Of course, not all Ministers used what was given to them and their speeches were usually all the better for that! I did some work with Margaret Hodge, when she was Minister for Disabled People, and she had a reputation for never using the speech that she was given. On one occasion though, by putting the whole speech onto powerpoint, she used every word of my prepared speech in order not to stray from the next set of points that were coming up on screen. Margaret Hodge later gave good support to the ESOL courses, Faith Forum, and support groups for Self-Harmers that I was involved with from St Margaret's Barking but I never, in that time, got around to reminding her about that anecdote!

The best speeches I have heard from a politician have been by John Battle in his unofficial (and non-Ministerial) role of link between the Government and faith communities. John would typically share some anecdotes from his constituency and summarise parts of his recent reading before linking these to his presentation of Government policy on faith communities. He'd generally prepare his material himself (often on the train on the way to the event) and his delivery was all the better for being personal and self-prepared.