Does your business need a Boris?
The British Prime Minister is currently winning the rhetoric battle. Here's how he does it, and a question: would you have him on your team?
DISCLAIMER
We’re a writing and coaching company: we don’t take sides in politics. But we are interested in how effectively organisations and the individuals within them use language – and that includes politicians and political parties. So it should: the words they use affect us all.
The Conservative Party has pulled off a dramatic and unlikely win in the Hartlepool by-election and defied usual political logic to triumph in the local council elections.
Only as week ago, The Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, said:
It’s very important for everybody to be aware of the deep psephological reality. It’s a massive, massive challenge, it would be a quite an extraordinary thing in my view if that [a win in Hartlepool] were to happen.
Notice anything odd about that sentence? There’s the over-casual use of the word ‘it’, but we’ll come to that – it – another time.
It’s the word psephological.
As I write it, Google Drive wants to correct it to ‘psychological’. Why? Because it’s an unusual, arcane word.
Here’s the thing. Politicians aren’t supposed to use unusual, arcane words. They are supposed to use the language of the common people. Even though we know they went to posh schools and grand universities and are perfectly at home with polysyllables, we they ask us to suspend our disbelief and think they really do like football and drink beer like the rest of us.
Not Johnson. He has never sought to disguise the fact he went to Eton and Oxford and studied classical Greek and Latin. He would be more than happy to tell you that psephology is the study of elections and voting trends, and that it takes its name from the Greek word for ‘pebble’ (ancient Athenian voters used pebbles to cast their ballots).
Johnson is a journalist by trade and a very fluent, funny writer he is too. He is also a student of rhetoric: the ancient art of persuasion. And that’s what’s fascinating about his current supremacy over his rival, Keir Starmer.
Starmer is one of the most talented and successful lawyers of his generation: a prosecutor by trade. Yet Starmer currently (see disclaimer, above) cannot lay a glove on Johnson and it is he who is feeling the pressure after Thursday’s elections, not the PM.
We asked the fearless political commentator Peter Oborne, formerly Johnson’s colleague at The Spectator, what he makes of the PM’s rhetoric:
Boris Johnson makes a great deal of use of classical rhetoric in order to make ambiguous statements which simultaneously make him appear learned while allowing him to avoid difficult questions. It also helps him to lie.
Oborne has made a long study of political rhetoric since his first book about New Labour’s Alistair Campbell. Those of us who study. His new book, The Assault on Truth, is essential reading for anyone who wants to take a moral as opposed to a purely technical view on the language public figures use.
Johnson’s friend Harry Mount wrote an interesting account last year of the PM’s fondness for Latin words and ancient rhetorical techniques. That includes one known as imbecilio. An easy translation is ‘playing the fool’. Why would any politician, let alone the leader of his country, want to play the fool? Edward Docx explains why in this fascinating Guardian piece: fools, clowns, get away with more and have a powerful knack of making everyone else on the stage seem boring. predictable and pompous. Most important of all: they’re on our side. We might only be in the audience, but we share the joke with them, even – or perhaps especially – when the fool is laughing at himself.
The most persuasive thing you can do
And that brings us to the most persuasive rhetorical trick of all.
This is from a book called The Wit of Persuasion by Walter Nash:
It is indeed the point of rhetoric to have designs on an audience, or a victim; and the purpose of these designs is not wholly to persuade, as may be commonly supposed, but rather to involve the recipient in a conspiracy from which there is no easy withdrawal. In rhetoric there is always an element of conspiracy; it can be magniloquent, or charming, or forceful, or devious, but whatever its manner it seeks assiduously to involve an accomplice in its designs.
That’s a bit of a mouthful, Walter. But to see his words in action, watch an interview with Boris Johnson and then one with Keir Starmer – or indeed, any other mainstream politician. Watch the eyes. Johnson’s say – come on, you’re with me on this. We all know it’s a bit of fun. Even when he’s trying extra hard to be serious, they say that. Starmer’s say – nothing. If I were on his communications team I’d be getting in the best media trainers I could to do something about the Labour leader’s glassy-eyed expression in front of the camera.
The other politician who brilliantly pulled off this ‘co-conspirator’ trick – or technique, if you prefer – was Johnson’s predecessor, Tony Blair.
I saw him in action in Downing Street a couple of times. One meeting was with a bunch of magazine editors.
The PM asked for questions. One editor – I can’t remember what her speciality title was: caravanning or camping or something – asked a long and involved question about what the government was going to do for caravaners or campers or something. Blair gave a bland answer: all the time, his eyes were on her except for the briefest of glances at the rest of us. Those glances were all he needed to say, you and I know exactly how much of a stuff I give about this. But of course he was charm personified.
Then an editor from a car magazine asked an equally long and passionate question about parking or B-roads or diesel additives or something. Blair listened attentively. ‘Do you know,’ he said. ‘I really don’t have an opinion on this’. He turned to his communications advisor. ‘Is the Prime Minister allowed not to have an opinion?’
Brilliant. Devastating. High-wire stuff. Don’t try this at home or, more pertinently, work. Nor the imbecelio trick. Not unless you really know what you’re doing.
Do you want a Boris in your business?
Send in the clowns
Business and politics have a lot in common. They both deal with serious amounts of information – seriously. You have to sit in long meetings going through a lot of detail. You also have to persuade people – investors, consumers, regulators and that mysterious group, stakeholders.
You’ll need to have a high boredom threshold in both occupations. Most of us sit there letting other people bore us until it’s our turn to bore them.
Then a rare someone comes along who isn’t boring. You sit up and listen. You laugh with them. You’re immediately on their side.
You have to be careful with these people. They tend to be the mavericks, the left-fielders, the off-the-cuff performers who can’t always be relied upon to have read the minutes or not to say something not just off-message but off-colour.
On balance, it’s safer not to have one of these on the team. But my, it can give you one hell of a competitive advantage when you do.
So can you be a bit Boris?
No. But you can learn the ancient techniques of persuasion. There are ways of writing as well as speaking that get people on your side. They become co-conspirators in your sentences, participants in your story. It only takes a day.
Songs for writers
By Bow Wow Wow
Need a song to bring out the reckless in you? Does that presentation need a bit more zip, danger and va-va-voom? You need Johnny Mercer’s lyric and Annabelle Lwin’s vocals. She got the job in the band formed by the former Sex Pistol’s manager Malcolm McLaren when someone heard her singing along to the radio in a laundrette. Her vocal style had not noticeably moved by the time of the recording. But it’s glorious.
For more about Forthwrite, head here.
The other Johnny Mercer has been prominent of late. But I am guessing you don't mean the lyrics of a retired-squaddie, public servant. Johnson? He's our stable genius. We - or at least nowhere near a majority - just don't know it yet.