Language matters – and nobody knows that more than Boris Johnson

For all the writerly adornments and the charges of lying (largely from within the political bubble), the PM speaks in a language most people readily understand and that corresponds to real life, writes Mary Dejevsky

‘I bet you can remember hearing Johnson warn that we should “prepare to lose loved ones before their time”’ (Getty)

The consistently best political communicator I have ever heard was Bill Clinton – by quite a margin. As a campaigner and two-term US president, from 1993 to 2001, he was clear and compelling; even when he squirmed with embarrassment as the Monica Lewinsky revelations emerged. Quite unusually for an American president, he was adept at reading international, as well as US, audiences. He also excelled at distilling quite complicated arguments so that they could be widely understood.

After Clinton might come Jacques Chirac, campaigning for the French Presidency in 1995 and 2002, and, after him – on a good, sober, day – Boris Yeltsin, during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then, as the first President of Russia. An outlier, entering thanks to his hugely under-estimated political savvy, might be Gerhard Schroeder, Germany’s Chancellor from 1998 to 2005, and still regarded there as a master-persuader.

To an extent, of course, the judgement depends on how you define “best”. I would define it as holding an audience and successfully getting your message across to the maximum number of people. What is in that message comes second – after all, if you can’t communicate it effectively, it is not going to matter that much. Which prompts the question about how today’s political leaders stack up.

In the past three weeks, I have seen quite a few politicians strutting their stuff, willingly or less so, and reached two conclusions. First, whether someone is campaigning for office or speaking from the relatively elevated position of a leader’s desk or lectern, communication really, really matters. However many high-tech gizmos you might have at your disposal, however friendly your audience, these assets cannot make up for substandard personal communications.

And, second, British politics – perhaps US politics, too, but less so – has in recent years evolved its own very particular manner and register, which, to my mind, at least, may have deepened an existing elite-popular divide.

As Exhibit A, I offer Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the actor/producer who was elected President of Ukraine in 2019. I saw him on the campaign trail before that election and a few months later when he addressed the international Yalta European Strategy conference in Kyiv, delivering an impressive, entertaining and substance-filled speech that showed his message and his professional performance skills perfectly matched.

I recently saw him at this year’s YES conference, where he was interviewed by Steven Sackur of the BBC’s Hard Talk programme. It was not the first time Zelenskiy had subjected himself to the Hard Talk treatment, so he knew what to expect. But it was not one of the Ukrainian President’s more successful appearances. Here was a more serious Zelenskiy, more aware perhaps of the constraints of high office and subdued by the experience of the pandemic, than he had been before. Afterwards, he came in for some criticism for avoiding or quibbling with some of the questions.

Now it may be that Zelenskiy was just not in a very good mood; it can happen. But it seemed to me rather that he had been subjected to a very British style of political interrogation, which took for granted that the Ukrainian President existed in the same rather small world of personal politics and political point-scoring, and this is not the world that Zelenskiy inhabits.

He wanted to talk about the real and immediate decisions he faced as Ukraine’s president, about practical rather than abstract things, and at times he simply did not understand the line of questioning. The problem, if there was one, was not of translation or at least not a technical problem of translation between languages – it was a translation problem between political cultures.

Starmer’s ‘make-or-break’ speech came with a myriad of coded hints and allusions to past leaders; it was an exercise in positioning and ‘framing’ that surely passed many potential voters by

As Exhibit B, I offer Germany’s three main candidates for Chancellor as they trod the campaign trail in the last week of the recent close-run election. Armin Laschet, the centre-right candidate who managed to squander a double-figure lead earlier in the summer is, to put it mildly, no born orator. But then neither was Angela Merkel in her first campaign to be Chancellor – when she, too, was almost pipped at the post, after losing a big lead to Schroeder, the then incumbent.

Experience, and the aura of office, transformed Merkel into a more than competent speaker, and her nationwide broadcasts during the pandemic were models of how to keep voters on-side during difficult times, her early career as an academic scientist proving a big asset. Laschet, on the other hand, will probably not get a second chance at the Chancellorship, and the inadequacy of his messaging is at least partly to blame.

Olaf Scholz, for the Social-Democrats (SPD) and now Merkel’s likely successor, and Annalena Baerbock for the Greens, on the other hand, both proved themselves to be strong campaigners: Scholz in a more conservative, explanatory manner; Baerbock in a more modern and freewheeling style. Both were effective on the stump and in television debates and round-tables, though Baerbock’s fortunes took a knock after some gaffe-prone early weeks and questions that arose about her CV.

What was striking about the campaign, however, whether on the stump on in TV debates and roundtables – including the one where, agonisingly, the main candidates appear on election night – was the clarity and concrete nature of the discussion and the lack of a rarefied political code. What they were saying would have been eminently comprehensible to everyone, not just to a “political class”. There were no nudges or winks, no abstruse references for the initiated, and almost no personal attacks.

Which opens the way to my Exhibit C: Keir Starmer’s “make-or-break” speech at the Labour Party conference. It was a long, and very mixed, bag, part designed to show “who I am” – as required by the current British demand (alas) for empathetic politics – and part to show a credible “government in waiting”. Except that it came with a myriad of coded hints and allusions to past leaders; it was an exercise in positioning and “framing” that surely passed many potential voters by.

For good measure, the speech itself had been preceded that morning on the BBC Today programme with a verbal duel between Nick Robinson and David Lammy. Lammy, one of the more accessible Labour politicians and an excellent radio-show host, was bombarded with hypothetical and “gotcha” questions that risked rendering the whole interview barely comprehensible, let alone relevant, to anyone beyond Westminster. Is this really how to connect politics to the people? Nor was it ever thus. If you watch a speech by Margaret Thatcher, say, or Harold Wilson, you are in no doubt as to what they are saying or its relevance to real life.

In conclusion, I would add this. The language and conduct of British politics today could be regarded as among the most sophisticated in the world and its political media as equal players. But how well does this serve the voters, compared with way politics works in Germany or Ukraine? Nor is it just a matter of its hyper-adversarial nature, it is the way politics itself and campaigning have been confined to an ever narrower circle.

No wonder people flocked to hear Jeremy Corbyn when he organised public rallies and presented his case in person and in words everyone could understand. It may also help to explain the popularity of Boris Johnson, despite everything. For all the writerly adornments and the charges of lying (largely from within the political bubble), he speaks in a language most people readily understand and that corresponds to real life.

I remember watching people at a market in a northern town recounting to a reporter almost verbatim something Boris Johnson had said. How many people will remember Starmer’s “work, care, equality, security” (I had to look it up only 24 hours later). But I bet you can remember hearing Johnson warn that we should “prepare to lose loved ones before their time”. That’s a gift, and a big asset, and it could win him a few more elections yet.