Talking of speeches, the problem with being a speechwriter is simple. The better you are, the less anyone should know.

Why? Because if you help write a speech for someone and it goes down well, that someone is likely to want to claim all the credit for the fine words and deft delivery. No speaker (as far as I know) has ever ended a well-received speech by thanking the speechwriter.

Although maybe it would be a good idea to start off a significant speech by thanking the speechwriter and disclaiming any responsibility for the content.

As a joke. Of course.

So how best to get round this and build the business? Not easy.

One approach is that taken by Martin Shovel (fellow member of the UK Speechwriters Guild) at Creativity Works, a busy communications consulting business that offers a full and good range of speechwriting and public-speaking coaching skills. If the client is happy to let it be known that help with a successful speech has been given by Martin and his team, that fact is pushed hard on Twitter and otherwise:

Martin Shovel

America likes the speech we wrote with Clare Gerada! Vital Speech of the Week & Ragan Health

That speech by Clare Gerada (Chair of the UK’s Royal College of General Practitioners) has a go at the Coalition’s NHS reform proposals and makes it into the US specialist public speaking publication Vital Speeches of the Week:

Of course, it’s important that GPs are mindful of resources. We have a responsibility to spend the public’s money carefully and wisely. That goes without saying.

But we must never lose sight of the patient as a person, at the heart of our practice.

Patients are not "commodities" to be bought and sold in the health marketplace.

In this brave new cost-driven, competitive, managed-care world, I worry about the effect the language of marketing is having on our clinical relationships.

It’s changing the precious relationship between clinician and patient into a crudely costed financial procedure. Turning our patients into aliquots of costed tariffs and us into financial managers of care.

We are already embracing the language of the market when we talk about, for example, care pathways, case management, demand management, productivity, clinical and financial alignment, risk stratification.

All good stirring stuff, if you like that sort of thing. But ultimately (for me) somewhat lacking intellectual substance.

Plus, as careful readers know, I think it unwise to pepper a speech with musty, needy exhortations. It was bad enough when David Miliband gave his dreary speech in Poland in 2009:

The verb need/needs is also used a startling 21 times in the speech. Thus ‘we need’:

  • a compelling positive case for the European Union
  • bold strokes
  • to deepen cooperation and incentivise reform
  • to diversify our energy supplies
  • more solidarity between Member States
  • to prepare better for energy shortfalls
  • to make G3 cooperation – US, China and the EU – work
  • to get better at formulating genuine strategic responses to the really difficult policy questions
  • to be a key player on the global stage 

This strange repetitive exhortatory language detached from any real analysis of the problems is reminiscent of the communist apparatchik from Party HQ standing on a barren collective farm field and addressing the workers.

He hectors them to even greater efforts to bring about the triumph of socialist productivity. They stare blankly at him, lost in their own thoughts and the disappointed emptiness of their blighted lives.

Clare Gerada’s speech offers us a veritable Milibandian 19 different uses of the words need and must in a twenty minute speech. Which, I suggest, is far too many.

Anyway, my own magnificent speechwriting efforts stay unobtrusive in the background, as befits the dignity and seniority of the people whom I now and again help. Which is as it should be. But, then, how to market myself and get more speeches to help write?

Ho. Hum.