My first thought on the Foreign Secretary’s Warsaw speech was that the opening ‘historic passages’ were clunky.

This is what happens.

The speechwriter is pretty familiar with the broad rhetorical lines of policy on EU issues. But knows nothing about Poland or the UK’s relations with it.

So s/he does some Googling to see what turns up, plus asks the Embassy for some ‘lively examples’ and maybe some quotable quotes from British/Polish relations down the ages. A few such examples are selected and plunked in an opening few paragraphs, supposedly to get the speech off to a lighter start.

The trouble with that as an oratorical device is that it is 100% phoney. Everyone knows that the speaker did not know this stuff himself but has tasked someone to do the dirty work.

Plus unless the examples are chosen thematically with a view to reinforcing some of the later points of substance, they literally make no sense.

In this case I might have tried to link the migration to Poland of poor Scots in the seventeenth century to the UK’s decision in 2005 to open its labour market to Poles fully. This makes the nice point that European peoples have always moved to and fro, and that the UK and Poland have no fear of such open markets now. 

Plus I might have praised Robin Cook for publishing a collection of papers on the FCO’s decades-long weasely equivocations about the Katyn massacre, linking that to the latest round of British reviews of Wajda’s momentous film on the subject as it at last opens in the UK. See eg this strong Guardian review. 

That reference would take the speaker to a passage about how Europe is still grappling with the legacy of WW2 even now, but in a spirit of open democratic and honest debate which we want to offer to Eastern Europe and other parts of the world as the "European way, which is hard and long – but works".

And so on. Taking some really striking examples of Change and Continuity woven seamlessly into the speech to make it an intellectually rich experience.

In fact, something the audience on the day and the wider readership of history might actually be impressed by, and enjoy. 

Not: "Here are some boring disembodied historical quotes, which I’ve never heard of but my speechwriter put in, because that’s what one does these days, but don’t worry, I’ll be through them soon…"

Yet there’s more!

Thanks to the miracles of IT we can now start quickly to compare the Check Against Delivery version handed out to the media beforehand with the real life speech.

And in this case speech-writing and communications expert Max Atkinson has done just that, for the first time, to see what happens.

The result makes explicit the Foreign Secretary’s unease at being served up historical speech material in a clumsy lump which was quite new to him:

"It goes back a long way. I didn’t know that Canute er- was the half Polish King of Denmark who, in 1015, actually invaded England, bringing with him Polish soldiers and his mother, Princess Swietoslawa, who er – is buried –is buried – Winchester castle.

"When I asked for a historical lesson from our ambassador, I didn’t realise it would be a pronunciation test, but it has become such."

Oh dear.
Net result? Diminished intellectual content, served up with a subliminally discourteous message that the FS had not done even the minimal amount of personal homework to deliver the material confidently?
The answer to the FCO’s speechwriting malaise? Here.