Fourteen years ago Bill Clinton flew to Belfast to put his stamp on the Northern Ireland peace process. He landed with an ace up his sleeve: a speech so steeped in local knowledge and human emotion that he managed to make a tense gathering of Protestants and Catholics in a chilly metal factory feel like a Pentecostalist revival meeting.
“I am proud to be of Ulster Scots stock,” he said. “I am proud to be, also, of Irish stock. I share these roots with millions and millions of Americans . . . And we rejoice at things being various, as Louis MacNeice once wrote. It is one of the things that makes America special.”
Towards the end of his address, the great persuader told his audience that he had been “overcome” by Northern Ireland’s natural beauty on the drive in from the airport. Fleet Street was overcome as well. The Times called that speech one of the finest of the Clinton presidency. The Guardian advised the Prime Minister, John Major, to “hire that man’s speechwriter”.
Major did not, but Gordon Brown did. He has reportedly paid more than $40,000 in recent years to West Wing Writers, a Washington firm staffed mainly by former Clinton speechwriters, including Vinca Lafleur, a Yale graduate and international relations specialist. She claims much of the credit for the Belfast speech in her entry on a corporate website offering everything from “speechwriting to strategy”.
One payment from Brown to West Wing Writers was for $9,810.50 (£6,610) for editing a single speech last year. More recently he paid $7,000 for touch-up work on his speech to the joint houses of Congress in March. “Some of the fees raise the eyebrows. They look high to me,” one Republican speechwriter in Washington says. They were still probably money well spent. The speech to Congress included lyrical references to Lincoln, Roosevelt and Washington as a “shining city on a hill” and earned 19 standing ovations for a man whose default style is that of a sledgehammer.
But the payments are more than a wrinkle in Downing Street’s expenses. They reflect the rapid commercialisation of the speechwriting craft — and its absorbtion into a PR industry worth £26 billion in Britain and the US alone — in an age when a single speech can make or break a political career and a single word in a chief executive’s address can sink a blue-chip stock.
The top writers form a select clique dependent above all on word-of-mouth recommendations, but the proof of their power is written across recent history. Barack Obama saved his presidential candidacy with a single speech on race in Philadelphia. David Cameron will almost certainly soon reach the top of a political trajectory launched with one perfectly judged speech at a party conference three years ago. David Davis’s performance was miserable by comparison.
“Thirty years ago, if Jim Callaghan was coming to Washington to give a speech, someone from Downing Street would have called someone in the Democratic Party, who would have recommended a friend to give advice,” says David Frum, a former speechwriter for the second President Bush, who has watched the rules of his trade change and who worked hard to help his old boss to live by them.
Rule 1 for a leader abroad is to assimilate the right amount of local knowledge. “If an American president was giving a speech in Britain I’d sure want him to consult with British-based people,” Frum says. “The tone, references and style are all different. With George Bush what were regarded as perfectly appropriate religious invocations at home would have been seen in London as the return of the Spanish Inquisition.”
Rule 2: hire professionals. For politicians and corporate leaders the stakes when they step up to the teleprompter are simply too high to leave the words to gifted — or deluded — amateurs. Hence firms such as West Wing Writers and the newly established UK Speechwriters’ Guild, set up by Brian Jenner, a former journalist who immediately doffs his hat to American speechwriters bred in a culture of aspirational citizens craving inspirational ideas.
“Americans are brilliant at the use of stories,” Jenner says. “Their politicians key into the American dream. They instinctively know that they’ve got to tell people how they’ve got to where they are, to make their speeches accessible.”
Not that they leave everything to instinct. US speechwriting is a labour- intensive affair with teams of perhaps five writers assigned to any major address, and it’s no coincidence that rhetoric is still widely taught to students in public communications courses in US universities. “They’re comfortable with the rule of triads, rhetorical questions, puzzle-solution formats and the use of contrasts,” Jenner says.
Triads? “Three-part lists. You put what you want to say into formats like poetry because the audience is expecting the third example, the third beat. ‘Father, Son and Holy Ghost’. It’s what gets people clapping.”
If that sounds calculating, it’s probably meant to. Jenner and others agree that too much British speechwriting is dull and offputting because of an inbred fear of being seen to manipulate an audience. That, and a failure to grasp the importance of narrative.
“If you want to engage with your public they have to think of you as a human being like them,” says Anthony Gordon Lennox, a former Question Time producer, who has worked with many political leaders, including David Cameron. “You have to use your speeches as opportunities for people to get to know you. You have your vulnerabilities, your strengths and weaknesses, but it’s not until people trust you that they’re going to listen. Humility is all.”
Is speechwriting being globalised as well as commercialised? Up to a point. The vital importance of finding the right tone for a speech to a foreign audience creates a market for local experts everywhere, but the US masters of the genre tend to trust their own people first. When George Bush gave a major foreign policy speech in Whitehall in 2003 he impressed a sceptical audience with self-deprecating references to American’s Puritan streak, and generous tributes to “the tireless compassion of Lord Shaftesbury” and “the righteous courage of Wilberforce”. The speech steered close but not too close to condescension.
“You have to be careful about patting the British on the head,” David Frum explains. But it was all in-house, written by the President’s own writers and vetted by National Security Council staff.
When Bush flew to Nova Scotia the next year to give a speech on US-Canadian relations, it was checked exclusively by his own people even though he had managed to offend millions of Canadians by failing to thank them for accommodating stranded transatlantic travellers in the wake of 9/11. Fortunately, for the White House, a Canadian-born staffer spotted the absence of a belated thank you and inserted stirring expressions of gratitude to Canadians.
The White House is a hard nut to crack. But Brian Jenner is confident that Brits can tap into the global speechwriting market as long as they park some of their Britishness at the door. There’s a place for British humour, but not for spinspeak. “The pernicious influence of advertising has taken out the verbs” from too much British discourse and persuaded politicians and businesspeople that they have to talk in bullet points, he says. “Speechwriting is about inspiring. It’s not branding, it’s artistic.”
The rewards for those who get it right can be considerable. Peggy Noonan, the founding genius of modern speechwriting and crafter of many of Ronald Reagan’s finest phrases, might earn $25,000 for a single speech for a major CEO.
The going rate in the US for a “from scratch” speech for a national leader is about $10,000, Frum says — far less than for a commercial client but far more lucrative as a calling card. “Politicians pay less than corporations and are generally more demanding,” says a former Tony Blair speechwriter. Without the kudos attached to writing speeches that could change the world, a speechwriter is nothing. “You trade on the name of a former employer,” Blair’s former man says.
Whether West Wing Writers will experience a spike in demand for its services after the disclosure of its work for No 10 — which it had hoped to keep confidential — remains to be seen. But everyone in the speechwriting business knows who its next global star will be. He is in Team Obama. His name is Jon Favreau. He’s 28, single, romantically linked to the actress Rashida Jones and credited with the first drafts of most of Obama’s campaign speeches.
Now immersed for 18 hours a day in the White House, Favreau has already decided this will be his last job in politics because “anything else would be so anticlimactic”. When he leaves he plans to write a screenplay, “or maybe a fiction book based loosely on what all of this was like”. Or perhaps some speeches. Not that Gordon Brown could afford them.
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