I won't say I sympathise with Sir
Keir Starmer after he madly called for the liberation of sausages from
Gaza. I shall treasure the memory for years to come. I shall also never cease to wonder how he did it.
Had he made the same mistake during the rehearsal he had undoubtedly gone through the night before? Was he trying so hard not to say 'sausages' that he actually did so? Does he have an unlikely passion for sausages, which he has never before been able to confess?
But here is the real point. All those who climb on to public platforms are asking for trouble and will sometimes get it, and we will all laugh when it happens.
For many years I have attempted a little light public speaking, and I know pretty much how the Prime Minister will have felt, on a smaller scale. As a Trotskyist undergraduate I used to harangue the York University Students' Union on great issues of the moment, with some success, demanding support for miners, postmen, power workers, railwaymen and other toilers who were, in those days, constantly striking in defiance of poor old Ted Heath's
Tory government.
Starmer calls for return of 'sausages' from Gaza
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Had Sir Keir made the same mistake during the rehearsal he had undoubtedly gone through the night before?
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It was easy, and it was popular with my fellows, and it was simple. But one evening, I went too far. I tried to combine a plea for striking dockers with a call to support a demonstration against the National Front, which was about to take place in Leicester. Unscripted as usual, I sought to bring the two causes together into a single car crash sentence (I can't remember how it went).
I knew as I spoke that it wasn't going to come out right and - fatally - paused. And so my enemies had the chance to get me. 'There are no docks in Leicester!' cried a mocking voice. This is of course quite true. The room, rejoicing in my discombobulation, dissolved into laughter.
But it was not over. I was speaking from on top of a wheeled trolley, just beneath the raised stage where the Union president sat. Somebody gave it a shove and so I rolled helplessly sideways and out through an open door. As soon as the trolley came to rest, I fled, knowing full well there could be no comeback from such a disaster, and I am pretty sure I never spoke there again.
Until that moment I had never known what the much-used expression 'I wished the ground would swallow me up' actually meant. Since then I have understood that it is literally true. And I experienced it again at a 1990 London press conference when I tried to ask the future Russian President Boris Yeltsin a question in Russian.
Does the PM have an unlikely passion for sausages, which he has never before been able to confess?
I had been studying the language and thought I was doing reasonably well. My teacher (a superb Leningrad-born tutor who also taught MI6 agents) had carefully checked out my question for grammar and stress, and approved it. I had it by heart. But it was an attempt to trip Yeltsin up, and the cunning old brute wasn't having any of that.
He pretended he could not understand it, scornfully bawling 'Shto!?' (What!?) at me in front of about 100 rivals who - having initially been impressed at my apparent feat – now rejoiced at my embarrassment. Once again, the ground failed to open beneath me. I had to sit there in the room for what seemed like a week, hot with shame, waiting for the chance to escape, desperately hoping to avoid any expressions of sympathy afterwards. The whole rest of the day is a blank in my mind.
Then there was the occasion in Grand Rapids, Michigan (There are no rapids there. They blew them up), where I attempted to debate with my late brother Christopher on the existence of God. This was one of two public contests we had, the other in London years before.
It took place in a gigantic former church, filled - as I quickly realised – by people who loathed me, and adored my sibling. Christopher, never abstemious before battle, was far from totally sober. One again it was foolish boldness that led me into catastrophe. I had got by heart (or thought I had) a chunk of Rudyard Kipling's poem 'Recessional' - the bit about 'If, drunk with sight of power, we loose/Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe'.
But when the moment came, my memory jammed fast and I stopped halfway through. That was bad enough, as the enormous hall fell into an awkward silence, but my brother (who in our childhood could recite Henry V's 'Once more unto the breach' speech right through) did not merely complete my chosen lines but also threw in a nasty later bit about 'lesser breeds without the law' which I had most definitely been planning to leave out. It would have been much better if I had called for the worldwide liberation of sausages.
Safer by far, you might think, to read from a script. Not totally. I once prepared elaborately to do this the first time I was ever invited to debate at the Oxford Union. I wrote a tremendous, lengthy oration, on the monarchy, cutting it up and glueing it onto little cards, so as to make it look less obvious that I was reading it out. And then, just before I was due to stand up, they read the minutes from the week before.
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The secretary reported: 'Ann Widdecombe spoke… and spoke…and spoke…and spoke'. I shoved my heap of little cards under the seat and risked an unscripted seven-minute speech. Mind you, a script has its problems, as Keir Starmer knows – he was reading from a clever machine which rolled the text before his eyes. I am sure the word 'sausages' was not in that script.
But isn't all this a bit too organised and pre-cooked? Shouldn't a speech be a living thing? This is why I rather favour heckling, a sign that the audience at least are awake and alive. Prime Ministers deserve to be heckled. It tests their wit and their self-possession. I am sorry that stewards nowadays so often fall upon such interrupters and drag them from the hall.
I am also pretty convinced, after observing several of these events, that the big parties plant knots of clappers in the hall to start waves of applause for the leader. How phoney. It is very tempting, if you are there, to rise to your feet and heckle.
At one Labour conference long ago I put it about in the bars of Bournemouth that I was thinking of heckling Sir Anthony Blair (as he then wasn't) during his annual performance. I wasn't really (a Press ticket doesn't give you the right to do such things), but I was interested to see whether word would get back.
I think it did. When I took my seat, I noted that several very large delegates were sitting very close to me, and eyeing me suspiciously. I reckon that if I had so much as begun to rise from my seat, I would have been flat on the floor in seconds and then half way to A&E within about a minute.
But it would have brightened an otherwise dull afternoon with a bit of reality. And that is what the sausages did, which is why I am so very glad Sir Keir mentioned them.
