Skip to main content

Memory man won't be remembered

I sat through a fair bit of Diddy David Cameron's speech to the Conservative Party Conference yesterday afternoon.

It was a strange affair.

He'd memorised an hour's worth of material and delivered without autocue, but made a deliberate point of telling us at the outset that this is what he intended to do. Forget Iain Duncan-Smith's "Quiet Man". Here was the Memory Man in action. I half expected him to recite the telephone number of each member of the audience.

Trouble is, Dave, people don't actually care that you can remember your lines. They just look at you and think you won't be a patch on Gordon Brown if we find ourselves in a spot of bother. Like floods. Or terror attacks. Or Foot and Mouth. Or Bluetongue. Or runs on banks.

One nice touch in the speech was a reference to facebook, which signalled the toff from Notting Hill to be an ubercool man of the people. Dave claimed to have found a group on the social networking site that celebrated his "hottie" status. This is further evidence that facebook must be banned from all workplaces at the earliest possible opportunity, as it's clearly having a detrimental effect on people's brains.

Gordon Brown didn't mention facebook in his speech to the Labour Party Conference. But I guess people who are actually credible as Prime Ministers probably don't spend too much time poking their mates and writing on other people's walls.

Comments

  1. Politicians who dabble on Facebook might find it a double edged sword. Recently Antoine Sarkozy, son of the French President, embarrassed his father by being revealed as a member of a Facebook group called "I love my own poo", which has a self-explanatory common interest. I'm sure there are plenty of other Facebook groups out there who are united by less favourable things to say about "Dave" Cameron...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Special Constable update

I've now studied the Special Constable poster in more detail (see blogs passim ) and can reveal the idea is even more complex and bizarre than I first thought. You'll recall that a Special is on some seedy looking street corner, just yards away from where a drug deal is in progress. He's keenly observing events and looks ready to take some kind of action. The copy says that Specials wear uniform and always have back-up. But this guy is on his own in plain clothes. Worrying. Perhaps he's off duty but just can't leave the policing thing alone? Once a part-time copper, always a part-time copper. But wait. There is back up. It comes in the form of the constable's own reflection in a puddle. If he took his eyes off the criminal activity for just a second and took the trouble to look down at his feet, he'd see that in Puddle Land, he is wearing a uniform and carrying a radio. There's enough material here to fill a semiotics seminar for a day. If I disco...

Captain Birdseye and other people of rank

Regular readers may recall that I once doubted the existence of Yeo Valley. I'd never heard of the Yeo mountain range and I therefore rated the likelihood of there being a valley at somewhere between 0 and 5%. Of course, I had yoghurt all over my face when I discovered that the place really does exist. Somewhere in Somerset, I seem to recall. Today, having read an article in the latest edition of The Marketer magazine, I'm astonished to discover that there really was a Captain Birdseye. Well, I need to qualify that just a little. There was a Mister Clarence Birdseye who invented the fish finger back in 1955. The avuncular, uniformed figure who dominated our TV screens for about thirty years may have been an invention of over-eager advertising creatives, but he didn't blow in on a trawler during a squall. There was actually some connection to a real human being. These revelations about fish and yoghurt are causing me considerable disquiet, because I'm wondering h...

Gary Gizmo and Crash Test Danny

Further to my last blog, I've started watching Discovery Kids with the mini-Ws, so that I can learn a bit more about science. The best programmes are Invention SOS and Crash Test Danny . SOS is fronted by a hyperactive Scotsman called Gary Gizmo, who teleports himself to the homes of children who are desperate for an invention that will solve a particular problem. One kid, for instance, wants a contraption for capturing spiders, while another is looking for something to help him clean up his bedroom. Gary pitches a tent in the back garden and sends the children back into the house for advice from a boffin. The crackpot scientists in question are always hidden in a wardrobe. And while they may dress differently from Gary and speak in exotic accents, they always seem to bear an uncanny resemblance to show's eccentric host. Crash Test Danny is a dummy who works at a top-secret research establishment. He acts as a fall guy for a bloke in a white coat who's simply known...