BRIAN JENNER

A
SPEECHWRITER’S
NOTEBOOK
2023
Outlandish ideas to get your
audiences to look up from
their phones, scratch their
heads and never see the world
in the same way again
Sometimes a sentence pops into my head from a book I’ve read.
It gnaws away at my subconscious, forcing me to reframe
everything. A sentence that did that for me this year was from
Rabbi Shais Taub’s God of Our Understanding. He wrote, “A true
study of humanity is ultimately a study in extreme paradox.”
It sunk in: Life is not just paradoxical, but extremely
paradoxical.
I copied out a different thought from a different book:
“There is no certainty that can be grasped either by the senses or
by the mind.”
A synthesis of these ideas came to me in an anecdote about
the philosopher William James. He couldn’t work out what to do
with his life and he got sick. A friend told him they were going on
a trip to the Amazon to collect specimens. Despite protestations,
his friend took him to the Amazon and literally threw him off
the boat.
“And in that moment was born every aspect of William
James’s philosophy, which is that you cannot think your way to
right action, you have to act your way to right thinking. And from
that came the James idea of pragmatism, that the good is what
works, and that we rewire ourselves by our behaviour.”

Brian Jenner
https://thespeechwriter.co.uk
Bournemouth
October 2022

ii
Brevity is the soul of…well, you know that one.

Hecklers Anonymous meeting, tonight, 7pm.

Bring your own boos.

Security is mortals’ chiefest enemy.

hecate , macbeth

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

rumi

Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.

epictetus

Things fade. Choices exclude.

irvin yalom

Unawareness is the root of all evil.

egyptian monk

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

herbert a simon

Grief and trouble bring life, whereas prosperity and pleasure

bring death.
meng tse

If you want to get across an idea, wrap it up in a person.

ralph bunche

Words become works.

seneca

1
I watched A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood about the American
children’s TV star Mister Rogers.

Interviewer: Who has made a difference in your life?

Oh, a lot of people, but a lot of people who have allowed me
to have some silence, and I don’t think we give that gift very
much anymore. I’m very concerned that our society is much
more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than
silence. How do we do that in our business? How do we encourage
reflection?… Oh my, this is a noisy world.

All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.

Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the
people who have helped you become who you are?
Ten seconds of silence.
emmy acceptance speech by mister rogers

You know, death is something many of us are uncomfortable

speaking about. But to die is to be human. And anything human
is mentionable. Anything mentionable is manageable.
a beautiful day in the neighbourhood

I often think of what Will Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization:

“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes
filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing
things historians usually record – while, on the banks, unnoticed,
people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write
poetry, whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what
happens on the banks.”
the world according to mister rogers

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I met Alex Klaushofer, the author of this piece, for lunch on Westbourne Grove
in 2022. I’m familiar with the Not Enough Tigers syndrome.

It came to my attention on a sleepy afternoon in a Gloucester

shop about a decade ago, a small, hippyish place selling a mix
of New Age and wellbeing products. Between me and the
shopkeeper I needed to pay for my essential oil was a woman
talking in the cyclical, repetitive way of the highly anxious. Would
the thing she wanted to buy do this? What about that? But what if
this? And what would she do if…? And so on.
It was some time before the spate of anxiety burnt itself out,
having been wondrously handled by the shopkeeper, a shaven-headed
woman in the garb of a Buddhist monk. Her anxious customer
departed, she turned to me with an eye roll. “Not enough tigers,”
she said. “It’s very common in Gloucester.”
I knew exactly what she meant. A few years before, I’d
returned to home ground to do a piece on the impact of higher-
than-usual flooding on local people and services. Amid the hazy
memories of the many interviews I did one sticks out: a dramatic
account by a middle-aged woman of having to drive through some
high water. Never in her life, ever, had she experienced anything
so horrific, she shuddered. Never, as God was her witness, would
she go through such a thing again. Not Enough Tigers indeed. In
the years that followed the phrase came to mind when I witnessed
an extreme example of the cushioned consumerism of the West
in comparison to the real risks and dangers faced daily by many
people elsewhere in the world.
Still, I thought Not Enough Tigers syndrome harmless
enough until – under its more common name of safetyism – it was
used during the Covid crisis as a justification for the imposition of
a level of control over people never previously known.

3
Extracts from Baltasar Gracián’s The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence.

299. Leave people hungry. Nectar should only ever brush the
lips. Desire is the measure of esteem. Even with physical thirst,
good taste’s trick is to stimulate it, not quench it. What’s good, if
sparse, is twice as good. The second time around, there’s a sharp
decline. A surfeit of pleasure is dangerous, for it occasions disdain
even towards what’s undisputedly excellent. The only rule in
pleasing is to seize upon an appetite already whetted. If you must
annoy it, do so through impatient desire rather than wearisome
pleasure. Hard-won happiness is twice as enjoyable.
132. Reconsider things. Taking a second look at things
provides security, especially when the solution isn’t obvious.
Take your time, whether to grant something or to improve your
situation – new reasons to confirm and corroborate your personal
judgement will appear. If it’s a question of giving, then a gift is
more valued because wisely given than quickly given; something
long desired is always more appreciated. If you must refuse, then
it allows time to think how, and for your refusal to taste less bitter,
because more mature and considered. More often than not, once
the initial desire for something has cooled, a refusal will not be felt
as a rebuff. If someone asks for something quickly, delay granting
it, which is a trick to deflect attention elsewhere.
133. Better mad with the crowd than sane all alone,
say politicians. For if everyone is mad, you’ll be different to none,
and if good sense stands alone, it will be taken as madness. To go
with the flow is so important. The greatest form of knowledge is,
on occasion, not to know, or to affect not to know. You have to
live with others, and most are ignorant. To live alone, you must
be either very like God or a complete animal. But I would modify
the aphorism and say: better sane with the majority than mad all
alone. For some want to be unique in their fantastical illusions.

4
Laws are such fun…

cayo ’ s law :The only things that start on time are those that
you’re late for.

sattinger ’ s law : It works better if you plug it in.

cann ’ s axiom : When all else fails read the instructions.

jenning ’ s corollary : The chance of bread falling on the

buttered side up is directly proportional to the cost of the carpet.

howe ’ s law : Everyone has a scheme that will not work.

blundell ’ s law :
All books over five hundred pages that weren’t
written by Dickens or a dead Russian are better left on the shelf.

rose ’ s rule :
Never invest your money in anything that eats or
needs repainting.

hoffer ’ s observation : When people are free to do as they

please, they usually imitate each other.

cole ’ s law : Shredded cabbage.

alinsky ’ s law : Those who are most moral are farthest from
the problem.

senator sorghum ’ s laws of politics : Never do anything that

popular opinion and your own sense of right do not approve.
Hire someone else to do it.

Anything you lose automatically doubles in value.

mignon mclaughlin

5
I found this on openculture.com

In 1994, Charles Bukowski was buried in a Los Angeles cemetery,

beneath a simple gravestone. The stone memorialises the poet’s
name. It recites his dates of birth and death, but adds the symbol
of a boxer between the two, suggesting his life was a struggle. And
it adds the very succinct epitaph, “Don’t Try.”
There you have it, Bukowski’s philosophy on art and life
boiled down to two words. But what do they mean? Let’s look
back at the epistolary record and find out.
In October 1963, Bukowski recounted in a letter to John
William Corrington how someone once asked him, “What do
you do? How do you write, create?” To which he replied: “You
don’t try. That’s very important: ‘not’ to try, either for Cadillacs,
creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you
wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to
come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out
and kill it. Or if you like its looks you make a pet out of it.”
Jumping forward to 1990, Bukowski sent a letter to his friend
William Packard and reminded him: “We work too hard. We try
too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at
us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much
direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for
asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a
bottle of beer.”

6
At one point I was thinking about going to Japan and trying to get
into the Eihei-ji monastery, but my spiritual advisor urged me to
stay here. He said there is nothing over there that isn’t here, and
he was correct. I learnt the truth of the Zen saying that if you
are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will
appear next door.
steve jobs

I had a friend who was a live-in counsellor at a drug treatment

centre. They had a white sticker and they’d give it to the guys who
came to the treatment facility and they’d say put it up above your
mirror and look at it the first thing in the morning. And the sticker
said: “You are now looking at the only problem you’ll have all day.”
shais taub

Stephen Hawking was once told that every equation he included

in a book would halve its readership.

Jesus used parables because he didn’t have access to statistics.

Years ago, Theodor Reik was being analysed by Freud, and as a

talented young man he was naturally interested not only in being
a superb analyst but a musician, a writer, a lover, a boulevardier, a
vigilante, even a mad genius. Freud listened and got angrier and
angrier. Finally, he said, “Reik, you want to be a big man? Piss in
one spot.”

7
My favourite book on money is The Seven Laws of Money which was
written in the 1970s by a Californian hippy called Michael Phillips (who
also developed Mastercard). Here are some highlights:

An examination of your money and the way you use your money
is a way of understanding yourself in the same way that a mirror
provides a way of seeing yourself.
The rules of money are probably Ben Franklin-type rules,
such as never squander it, don’t be a spendthrift, be very careful,
you have to account for what you’re doing, you must keep track of
it, and you can never ignore what happens to money…
…paying attention to the details of our lives is part of
understanding who we are, and part of growing. Our inattentiveness
toward money is enough of a misperception of reality that it can
lead us into trouble, in the same sense that any misperception of
reality can lead us to trouble.
In most cases, no change in the availability of money is going
to change a person’s priorities.
People invariably have scapegoats, and money has always
been one of the most convenient ones because it is commonly
agreed that we can’t do most of the things we want to do because
we don’t have enough money.

8
Openings:

I’d prefer you to take notice than to take notes.

nigel risner

I am reminded of the story of the verger who said to the visiting

bishop, about to preach: “I would speak up, my lord, the agnostics
in here are terrible.”

You can always tell how highly you are rated as a speaker by how
long before the event you are asked to speak.
International statesmen of the calibre of Tony Blair and
David Cameron are often approached 18 months in advance.
Former British cabinet ministers might need six months’ notice.
You might be able to book a reasonably well-known national
TV celebrity with four weeks’ warning.
On the other hand, you can probably get a local public figure
or clergyman if you have the courtesy to let them know a couple
of days before your event.
So…it was with enormous pleasure…that I received your
chairman’s phone call at 6.30 this morning…

Liz Truss gave a speech when she won the Conservative leadership election.
This was the opening line I would have given her…

Friends, enemies. And enemies who pretend to be friends…

9
Feisty American writer Barbara Ehrenreich died this year. I’m not sure she
would have been too bothered, because she wrote very serenely about death.
I love her book Dancing in the Streets.

Protestantism – especially in its ascetic, Calvinist form – played

a major role in convincing large numbers of people not only
that unremitting, disciplined labour was good for their souls, but
that festivities were positively sinful, along with mere idleness. In
part, its appeal was probably similar to that of much evangelical
Christianity today; it offered people the self-discipline demanded
by a harsher economic order: Curb your drinking, learn to rise
before the sun, work until dark, and be grateful for whatever
you’re paid. In addition, ambitious middle-class people were
increasingly repelled by the profligacy of the Catholic Church
and the old feudal nobility – not only the lavish cathedrals and
wealthy monasteries but the seasonal round of festive blow outs.
Protestantism, serving as the ideological handmaiden of the new
capitalism, “descended like a frost on the life of ‘Merrie Old
England,’’’ as Weber put it, destroying in its icy grip the usual
Christmas festivities, the maypole, the games, and all traditional
forms of group pleasure.
…carnival is something people create and generate for
themselves. Or, as Goethe wrote, carnival “is a festival that really is
not given to the people, but one that the people give themselves”.
So civilization…has this fundamental flaw: It tends to be
hierarchical, with some class or group wielding power over the
majority, and hierarchy is antagonistic to the festive and ecstatic
tradition. This leaves hierarchical societies with no means of
holding people together except for mass spectacles – and force.

10
Some thoughts on action…

Way back in 1952 when I was about to enter high school, Florence
Chadwick became the first woman to ever swim the Catalina
Channel, but she had to make two attempts before she did. On
her first try she quit after swimming 21.5 miles, only a half-mile
from the distant shore. The reason? It was not the freezing cold
water. Or the fear of the sharks around her. Or even her fatigue.
She later told reporters that it was because she could not see the
shore through the fog. She had lost sight of her goal. Two months
later she swam the same channel, this time with a clear mental
picture of the shore that lay beyond the fog. She succeeded.
When faced with a task that daunts you, a project that you find
difficult, begin by doing something. Choose a small component
that seems potentially relevant to the task. While it seems to
make sense to plan everything before you start, mostly you can’t:
objectives are not clearly enough defined, the nature of the
problem keeps shifting, it is too complex, and you lack sufficient
information. The direct approach is simply impossible. Every
writer has experience of sitting at a blank page, waiting for
inspiration. The wait is often lengthy. Get it down. That is how
this book was written, and it couldn’t have been done in any other
way. Only an oblique approach could have worked.
john kay

Robert Cialdini offers a six-point guide to structuring a mystery story.

1) Pose the Mystery

2) Deepen the Mystery
3) Home in on the Proper Explanation by Considering (and
Offering Evidence Against) Alternative Explanations
4) Provide a Clue to the Proper Explanation
5) Resolve the Mystery
6) Draw the Implication for the Phenomenon Under Study

11
This year I had to write a presentation on anti-complexity. The theory is if
you eliminate complexity, you’ll have a successful life. Writing the script, it
reminded me of Evagrius Ponticus, an Egyptian monk, who identified the
eight traps and temptations that distort our understanding by giving us false
perspectives. There are eight tempting thoughts (logismoi).

1) Gluttony
Defined as “anxiety about one’s health or about becoming ill”.
It covers being realistic in what you eat and modifying your diet.
Don’t waste time and energy planning for something that has
not yet happened and may never happen.

2) Fornication
Evagrius warns of “imaginary entanglements”: an obsession with
the unreal. Real human relationships with real human people are
not the problem. Humility represents an abandonment of the
desire to establish power and superiority by dominating and
using others.

3) Avarice
The love of money. Futile planning for an unreal future.
The principle of thinking about what does not yet exist –
a preoccupation with hopes and fears, with imaginary or
future things.

4) Envy
It involves an obsession with the past, a haunting remembrance
of old days never to return. Wallowing in wishes and fantasies
of things being other than the way they are.

5) Anger
The problem is not the emotion but clinging to its fervour.
Resentment that refuses forgiveness. Anger should be directed
at our own faults and especially how we have wronged others.
An obsession with someone who has wronged us can make us
hallucinate poisonous snakes.

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6) Acedia
A kind of listlessness or boredom – self-pity. Nurturing bitter
thoughts that trap us and tempt us to abandon course.
What’s the use? Nobody cares. Nothing matters, anyway.

7) Vainglory
Daydreaming about one’s own magnificence and imagined
glory which actually reflects an impoverished sense of self and
a feeling of personal inadequacy.

8) Pride
Supposing that we can do anything without the help of God
which amounts to the claim to be God. Self-justification turns
out to breed most human difficulties.

Evagrius’ cure:
These are the roots of evil deeds. Bad vision leads to bad choices.
We have to strive to see things as they truly are rather than
from the perspective of our fears and fantasies. The tone of the
Evagrius list is: “Don’t waste time thinking about what thinking
can’t change.”
ernest kurtz

Envy is so shameful a passion that we never dare acknowledge it.

françois de la rochefoucauld

13
The entertaining American satirist P J O’Rourke died this year.

As a foundation for a political system, fairness may be no virtue

at all. The Old Testament is clear on this point. The Bible might
seem an odd place to be doing economic research, especially
by someone who goes to church about once a year, and only
then to give the Easter Bunny time to deliver Peeps. However, I
have been thinking – in socioeconomic terms – about the Tenth
Commandment.
The first nine Commandments concern theological principles
and social law. Thou shalt not make graven images, steal, kill, etc.
Fair enough. But then there’s the Tenth Commandment: “Thou
shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, thou shalt not covet thy
neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor
his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbour’s.” Here are
God’s basic rules about how we should live, a very brief list of
sacred obligations and solemn moral precepts, and right at the end
of it is, “Don’t envy your buddy’s cow.”
What is that doing in there? Why would God, with just ten
things to tell Moses, choose, as one of them, jealousy about the
livestock next door? And yet, think about how important to the
well-being of a community this Commandment is. If you want a
donkey, if you want a pot roast, if you want a cleaning lady, don’t
bitch about what the people across the street have. Go get your own.
The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists,
to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American
presidential candidates – to everyone who believes that wealth
should be redistributed. And the message is clear and concise:
Go to hell.

14
Some answers to our problems…

Nobody tells the truth. They tell a version of the truth with their
emotional associations.
david milch

If we have a stake in believing ourselves victimised, we pursue

situations in which we can conceive ourselves as victims.
david milch

A new name for an ailment affects people like a Parisian name for
a novel garment. Every one hastens to get it. A minutely described
disease costs many a man his earthly days of comfort.
mary baker eddy

The difference between a warrior and an ordinary man is that a

warrior sees everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man sees
everything as either a blessing or a curse.
carlos castaneda

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business,

and eventually degenerates into a racket.
eric hoffer

As the mystic poet Rumi says: don’t grieve. Anything you lose
comes round in another form.

The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: break

a pattern.
chip and dan heath

15
I read Joshua Foer’s Moonwalking with Einstein, which is all about
memory, something I like to cultivate.

So why bother investing in one’s memory in an age of externalised

memories? The best answer I can give is the one that I received
unwittingly from EP, whose memory had been so completely lost
that he could not place himself in time or space, or relative to
other people. That is: How we perceive the world and how we act
in it are products of how and what we remember. We’re all just
a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent
that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those
habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting
joke, invention, insight or work of art was ever produced by an
external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humour in
the world, to make connections between previously unconnected
notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All
these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than
ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace
than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember.
Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our
values and source of our character. Competing to see who can
memorise more pages of poetry might seem beside the point,
but it’s about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing
primal capacities from which too many of us have become
estranged. That’s what Ed had been trying to impart to me from
the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of
performing party tricks: it’s about nurturing something profoundly
and essentially human.

When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and
banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is
not being stirred by anything novel or marvellous. But if we see or
hear something exceptionally extraordinary, great, unbelievable,
or laughable, that we are likely to remember a long time.
rhetorica ad herennium

16
Deep in the laws and commentaries of the Talmud, there is an
unusual provision about capital punishment: if all 71 judges in a
capital case agree that the death penalty should be imposed, then
it is automatically taken off the table.
This seems counterintuitive, given that courts today often
insist on unanimity to convict someone of murder. But the
Talmudic principle embodies an important insight about the perils
of consensus: if everyone is seeing things a certain way, you may
well have missed something important…
james surowiecki

The beauty of uncertainty is that it allows us to overcome our

fear. It allows us to take risks so we can experience faith. A life
without uncertainty is the end of the imagination; the death of the
imagined; the negation of faith.
brian hendricks

Jonathan Sacks tells the story of how a headmistress of a failing

London school contacted him. Morale was at an all-time low.
Parents were withdrawing their children. Exam results were bad.
It was clear that if things carried on, the school would have to close.
They discussed how to improve the school as a community.
He then suggested, “I want you to live one word: celebrate!” The
headmistress sighed and said there wasn’t anything to celebrate.
The Chief Rabbi said: “Find something to celebrate – if a student
has done better than last week, celebrate, if someone has a
birthday, celebrate.”
Grudgingly the headmistress agreed to try. Eight years later
she happened to get back in touch with him. She had put his
advice into practice. The school had been transformed. Exam
results had improved and the roll of pupils had increased. She said
that one word “celebrate” had transformed the school.

17
This is from Julian Shapiro, julian.com

One of the most valuable writing skills is the ability to generate

novel ideas. I was watching a documentary on songwriter Ed Sheeran.
In it, he described his songwriting process. It struck me as identical
to the process that author Neil Gaiman detailed in his Masterclass.
Here’s the thing.
Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.0000001% of
their fields. They’re among, say, the 25 people in the world who
repeatedly generate blockbusters.
If two world-class creators share the exact same creative
process, I get curious.
I call their approach the Creativity Faucet:
Visualise your creativity as a backed-up pipe of water. The
first mile is packed with waste water. This waste water must be
emptied before clear water arrives.
Because your pipe has only one faucet, there’s no shortcut to
achieving clarity other than first emptying the waste water.
Let’s apply this to creativity: At the beginning of a writing
session, write out every bad idea that unavoidably comes to mind.
Instead of being self-critical and resisting them, recognise bad
ideas as progress.
Once the bad ideas are emptied, strong ideas begin to arrive.
Here’s my guess why: Once you’ve generated enough bad
output, your mind reflexively identifies which elements caused the
badness. Then it becomes good at avoiding them. You start pattern-
matching interesting and novel ideas with greater intuition.
Most creators resist the bad ideas and never reach the clear
water. If you’ve opened a blank document, scribbled a few
thoughts, then walked away because you weren’t struck with gold,
then you’ve never got past it.

18
Speechwriters are always dreaming of the right chiasmus…

A business without a sign is a sign of no business.

You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.

ray bradbury

We always ignore the ones who adore us and adore the ones
who ignore us.
drake

It’s not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.
machiavelli

The value of marriage is not that adults produce children,

but that children produce adults.
peter de vries

Some like to understand what they believe in. Others like to

believe in what they understand.
stanislaw jerzy lec

I’d get to a point with my colleagues when I couldn’t explain

any further, because it came down to “To him who has had
the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not,
none is possible.”
ram dass

The busy man is never wise, and the wise man is never busy.
lin yutang

19
The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely
in the imagination. It is what an individual thinks about his
life, much more than the objective condition in which he lives,
which determines whether he will be happy or unhappy and
therefore, in the truest sense, successful or unsuccessful. The same
circumstances in which one man is contented and prosperous,
because he has perhaps sought and desired them or at least
regards them as right and fitting, will make another man violently
unhappy, if he considers them to be the result of personal failure
or unjust treatment.
enoch powell

When you wage a war against the self by exiling the parts you
condemn as bad, then inevitably, even without any mystical
causality, conflict will erupt around you.
Peace is the capacity to hold the parts that we are
uncomfortable with.
charles eisenstein

Greater the deed, greater the need

Lightly to laugh it away
Shall be the mark of the English breed
Until the Judgement Day!
rudyard kipling

When an intelligent person hears a wise saying,

he praises it and adds to it;
when a fool hears it, he laughs at it
and throws it behind his back.
sirach 21 v 15

20
This is an extract from the Provost of Eton’s speech to the boys of Eton after
the death of Queen Elizabeth.

So what is going on? Why is the death of this one old lady, our
late Queen Elizabeth II, so profoundly moving? Not just here in
Britain, but around the world? Because it is profoundly moving,
and if you do not feel it, there is perhaps something a little missing
in you. The answer I think is this. Through the genetic lottery of
hereditary monarchy she had, not of her choice, laid upon her
a task, from which she could not honourably escape, of almost
intolerable weight. The task was to inhabit a role – and I use the
word borrowed from the theatre deliberately – a role which meant
that every day of her long life was constrained and shaped and
observed; which meant that she sacrificed virtually all her freedom
and voluntarily circumscribed her own individuality; a role which
made us all feel that we owned her…
No society or community can survive long without the
rituals which embody what Shakespeare calls the state’s soul – the
ideals and dreams to which that society wishes to aspire, though
all societies fail much of the time to achieve them. As another
book of the Old Testament puts it: “Where there is no vision, the
people perish.” Some countries choose as Britain does, to have a
hereditary constitutional monarch whom we require to embody
that vision, that soul of our community, of our nationhood.
Without thinking, often, what we are asking, we lay upon an
individual human being what is a tremendous duty. We choose
the person in an ancient way, by heredity, and require them to
undertake the near impossible task of representing the sort of
values to which we aspire and then to keep those values themselves
safe from what Winston Churchill called the rancour and asperity
of party politics – rancour and asperity which are inseparable
from democracy but which, unless they are bounded by some
sense of shared service to the national community, can shake
a nation to pieces.

21
A Chinese sage was once asked by his disciples what he would
do first to set right the affairs of the country. “I should see to it,”
he said, “that language is used correctly.” The disciples looked
perplexed. “Surely,” they said, “this is a trivial matter. Why should
you deem it so important?” The Master replied: “If language is
not used correctly, then what is said is not what is meant; if what
is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains
undone, and morals and art will be corrupted; if morals and art
are corrupted, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the
people will stand about in helpless confusion.”

The Yehudi was asked: “In the Talmud, it says that the stork is
called hasida in Hebrew, that is, the devout and loving one, because
he gives so much love to his mate and his young. Then why is he
classed in the Scriptures with the unclean birds?”
He answered: “Because he only loves his own.”

Do you ever get presented with a cup of tea that’s quite a bit
below the edge of the mug? In our house we can look up at the tea
maker with love and say: “The tide’s out!” Said maker of the tea
normally gives a raised eyebrow, but knows the rules, retreats and
goes and replenishes the mug until the tide is well and truly in!

Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be.

dennis gunton

If a child is interested in coins, teach her history, economics

and Moby Dick with coins.
william james

22
Former White House speechwriter Hal Gordon gave me the story of the
king’s 1939 Christmas broadcast.

During the first Christmas of the Second World War George VI

had to deliver the Christmas broadcast. Someone at the palace (the
consensus is that it was his wife) gave the king some lines from an
obscure book of poetry that had been published thirty years before.
These lines suited perfectly the message of hope that the king
wished to give his people, and he used them with great effect at
the end of the broadcast:
I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year
Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.
And he replied,
Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.
The king concluded: “May that Almighty hand uphold and
guide us all.”
The poem made the broadcast. And one might almost say
that it made King George.
It is impossible to exaggerate the effect that this brief radio
address had on British morale, or on the British people’s affection
for their king.
Forever after, the lines he quoted during that fateful broadcast
were associated in the public mind with George VI. When the
king died in 1952, they were engraved in his memorial chapel.

23
Ten tips for European speechwriters. We publish these suggestions in our
conference packs every year.

1. Listen. The tone of voice a person uses can reveal the meaning
behind the words.

2. Your script is for ears, not eyes. Read it aloud.

3. Go to lectures, political events, church and public meetings

of all kinds. Make notes on what works and what doesn’t.

4. Volunteer to make speeches. Join a Toastmasters

International club.

5. Meet other speechwriters. Go to conferences. Go to events.

6. Don’t analyse problems: identify solutions. Praise innovators,

use humour, offer hope.

7. Keep a commonplace book for quotations, statistics, stories,

ideas. Order them under headings.

8. Knowledge of foreign languages enriches our work.

We are linguists. Translation is what we do.

9. Keep copies of the speeches you write. Review how your work
evolves over time.

10. Pass on your skills and expertise. The world is in desperate

need of good communicators.

24
Published by the UK Speechwriters Guild
www.ukspeechwritersguild.co.uk
Designed by Goldust Design
© 2022 Brian Jenner
ISBN 978-0-9563226-6-1
 The European Speechwriter Network (which includes
the UK Speechwriters’ Guild) is a membership organisation
that brings together people who write speeches for
governments and corporations.

We publish a lively newsletter with jobs, analysis

of speeches that have made the news and insights
that help you improve your own writing.

We organise at least one conference a year in Oxford

or Cambridge, as well as events and training.

We believe that public speaking is the oldest and

most civilised form of communication.

We encourage you to practise it at every opportunity.

(And if you don’t know what to say,

you know where to come…)

ISBN 978-0-9563226-6-1

9 780956 322661
£7.50