Getting personal: the curse of Downing Street

Everyone appreciates the personal touch, especially when dealing with big organisations and government. Nowadays, 'connecting' and 'engaging' with the general public are the guiding principles of communications professionals everywhere.

And yet striking the right personal note is not as easy as you'd think. And regardless of which political party is in power, writing letters from Downing Street seems to be particularly fraught with difficulty.

Much was made by the media recently of the fact that Downing Street had been sending out letters signed by fictional staff with computer-generated names. This had been standard practice since 2005 after a member of staff from Number 10 was threatened outside her home. Clearly, it was assumed that people like to get word-processed letters with a personal, handwritten signature and the decision was made to use false names.

The truth only emerged after Labour MP Gerald Kaufamn, tried to contact a 'Mrs E Adams', who had signed a letter he had received. Staff at the Downing Street office had to admit she didn't exist.

From now on, no more false names will be used by the Downing Street office. I wonder how letters from staff will be signed off in future?

Two years ago, beleaguered Prime Minister Gordon Brown was accused of being disrespectful to the grieving mother of a soldier who had been killed by a bomb in Afghanistan. What had he done? He had sent her a handwritten note to offer his personal condolences.

Unfortunately he had initially misspelled the son's name and corrected it rather than starting afresh. Also, his handwriting was deemed a hastily-scrawled "insult". In all, The Sun found 20 mistakes, including writing the letter "i" incorrectly 18 times.

Gordon Brown was forced onto the defensive and had to apologise to the mother, Jacquie Janes (not James, as Gordon had written), by telephone.

Even allowing for Gordon Brown's poor eyesight, it seems hard to believe that no-one at Number 10 intervened to suggest he should bin his first attempt and try again. As Robert Crampton wrote in The Times, "Gordon Brown screwed up by not screwing it up."

Of course, this would never have happened to fictional President Bartlett, of US TV series The West Wing. Whenever the storyline included the death of a member of the armed forces, President Bartlett always made a personal call to the next of kin - a truly personal touch.

We non-fictional humans are so hard to please.

Say what you mean and mean what you say

Gordon Brown's spectacular own goal this week - instantly dubbed "Brown's 'bigot' gaffe" by the media - may well be the defining moment not just of his election campaign but of his political career. As Roy Greenslade put it in his Guardian Blog yesterday:  "It was the gaffe of all gaffes. And he will pay dearly for it."

Ah, the perils of getting out and about and talking to real people.  A slightly awkward encounter with 65 year-old widow Gillian Duffy, who talked about eastern Europeans 'flocking' into Britain, was turned into a full-blown disaster when Gordon Brown got into his waiting car and made what was called "unguarded comments" to an aide, little realising that the lapel microphone provided by Sky News was still turned on.

He described Mrs Duffy as "a sort of bigoted woman". Later that day he was caught holding his head in his hands as Jeremy Vine played the comments back to the nation. Yesterday The Daily Mail helpfully produced a page of pictures which showed how the whole gruesome episode unfolded in the space of one hour.

So, what is a gaffe?  The Free Dictionary defines it as: 1. A clumsy social error; a faux pas; and 2. A blatant mistake or misjudgment.

I learned this week from a Comment if Free piece in the Guardian by Jacob Weisberg, that Gordon Brown had made what is technically a Kinsley gaffe - defined by Wikipedia as: "an occurrence of (a politician) telling the truth by accident."  The term was first coined by American political journalist Michael Kinsley in 1992.

It could also be defined as a microphone gaffe.  Wikipedia defines this as "an error whereby a microphone is switched on in proximity of a subject who is unaware that their remarks are being broadcast." And this type of gaffe catches out not just politicians, but sports presenters, journalists and newsreaders. But this equation is probably true:  human + microphone = disaster waiting to happen.

Gordon Brown's remarks are included in Wikipedia's list of political gaffes, just below Jesse Jackson's 2008 whispered aside before a Fox News interview that he wanted to "cut his (Barack Obama's) nuts off" after Obama had made an election speech questioning working class values. Third on the list is Prime Minister John Major's comments after an ITN interview in 1993 in which he called members of his Cabinet "bastards". Top of the list is the infamous 'soundcheck' comments made by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 during the Cold War. Although never broadcast, he said: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Curiously, Hillary Clinton's use of the phrase 'to misspeak' seems to be missing from the list. She was famously caught out during the 2008 race for the democratic presidential nomination exaggerating the dangers she had faced in 1996 during a short trip to Bosnia. When challenged, she said "I misspoke". There's a wonderful essay in the New Yorker about the issue of 'misspeaking' here.

But back to the hapless Gordon Brown, if  I was putting together a 'package' of visuals to describe his week, I'd be tempted to use 'I am not a robot' by Marina and the Diamonds as the backing track. Why?  Listen to the lyrics:


I guess the moral of the tale for politicians is: always try to say what you mean and mean what you say.
Hah!