When They Go Low, We Go High by Philip Collins

Author:Philip Collins [COLLINS, PHILIP]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LCO018000, HIS037000, LAN015000, LAN026000
ISBN: 9781468316179
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

4

PROGRESS:

THROUGH POLITICS THE CONDITION OF THE PEOPLE IS IMPROVED

The Guy Next Door

I never expected Les Dawson to be such an important voice for improving the condition of the people. The setting was the Labour Party conference in Manchester Central on 26 September 2006. Prime Minister Tony Blair had made it plain that this was to be his last address to the conference. In truth, the party had tired of him and allegiance was moving, by slow degrees but inexorably, to his main rival, the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown.

The previous day, Brown’s own conference speech had been pushed down the news schedule by a remark allegedly made by Blair’s wife Cherie to the effect that he, Brown, was less than sincere in his demand, from the podium, for a more equal society. If this seems a trivial dispute a decade on, it was big news on the day. I had prepared an address on how globalisation, trade between nations and the movement of people brought with it both great prosperity but also the test of ensuring that the rewards were evenly distributed. That message would be lost entirely if we could not divine a way to close down the Cherie and Gordon story.

We knew that the solution was a joke. Scriptwriters and playwrights hide plot twists in a joke. In the midst of laughter an audience drops its guard. The smuggled plot twist they notice only in retrospect. A joke in a speech has the same dual function. A Greek joke book called Philogelos (The Laughter-Lover) survives from the fourth century BC, and three books of Cicero’s jokes, which he was thought to use too much, were published after his death, though they are sadly lost to posterity. As long as it works as a joke, it simultaneously allows a contested point to be gently made, or a concession to be granted, as it was in this case. Searching frantically for the right line with the clock running down, it struck me that the circumstances had all the elements of music hall. There was a wife too candid for her own good whose truth-telling embarrassed the put-upon husband and a rival man who lived next door. Looking up all the comedians of the right vintage, I found nothing suitable in Arthur Askey or Max Miller, but then I hit upon this, from a local boy, Les Dawson of Collyhurst, Manchester: ‘My wife’s run off with the guy next door. And, do you know what, I’m really going to miss him.’

The prime minister, not to my knowledge much of a Les Dawson fan, liked the joke, and so we tried to make it work. In its unvarnished form the gag was too vulgar, too obviously seaside-postcard for a prime minister, so we had to turn the line. The final version was left out of the script released to the press and did not appear on the autocue. It was left to Blair himself, in the spotlight on the stage, to read the mood of the audience.

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