“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

These are the words of Edward Kennedy addressing a rapturous Democratic convention in 1980. Except that they aren’t the words of Ted Kennedy at all. They are, as Kennedy had the grace to admit, the words of the liberal political consultant Bob Shrum. Since his first Presidential campaign, the tilt for the crown of Senator Ed Muskie in 1972, Shrum has been putting phrases in mouths. And brilliant phrases they have been too.

Who can blame Gordon Brown for wanting to lay his hands on a writer of Shrum’s quality?

If Mr Shrum has been reprising some of his favourite lines in Mr Brown’s speech, then it’s quite an irony. For slyly pinching bits of Shrum has been a sport for most other speech writers for at least 30 years. Just to give one example – the technique Shrum first pioneered of listing people the candidate has met on his travels and repeating their wisdom was thrillingly original when done back in 1980, but is now, through overuse by less skilled writers, a hideous cliché.

All speechwriters borrow bits and pieces. They use structures and moods and cadences. Ted Sorenson’s work for John F. Kennedy is among the most mimicked prose. But writers don’t often cross the line and use whole phrases penned by others.

In his recently published memoirs, Shrum recalled his horror at the Presidential candidate Joe Biden pinching exact words from Neil Kinnock without attribution. Shrum had already warned the Biden campaign about such plagiarism before the scandal blew up. What was damaging was that Biden claimed to be the first Biden in a thousand generations to go to college, appropriating a bit of Kinnock’s life, albeit that it was true of Biden too. There is a slight whiff of that in Mr Brown appropriating Al Gore’s claim to be a serious man.

What makes the Brown speech lines different is that they come from the words of candidates with a common adviser. The incident is a symbol of how political advice is now an international commodity.

The Tories invited the Australian liberal Andrew Robb to help on the 1997 election campaign and at the last election put his compatriot Lynton Crosby in charge. Meanwhile Philip Gould, adviser to Tony Blair, built an extensive network of American contacts from the Clinton campaign and worked with them on foreign and domestic elections. In 1999 William Hague made his conference speech theme a call for a Common Sense Revolution, the direct result of the close relationship between his advisers and the advisers to Mike Harris, the Ontario Prime Minister, whose slogan it was.

The problem for these international consultants? It’s not only the market for their words that has become international, it’s also the ability to access their old words on the internet.

Daniel Finkelstein was a speechwriter for William Hague

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