Is That Mic Off?: More Things Politicians Wish They Hadn't Said

By Phil Mason

If you want to hear something stupid, just listen to the nearest politician. From the authors of Read My Lips and Mission Accomplished!, this completely new collection of politicians' gaffes, slips and brain freezes brings the verbal misstep into the present era of coalition government in Britain, the 2012 presidential election campaign in America and the global phenomenon of Wikileaks. Here is a treasure trove of the finest worst utterings from the men and women whose main skill is meant to be their power of communication. From Bush, Obama and Palin to Brown, Cameron, Clegg and co., the mad, the bad, the stupid and the shameless are all in attendance -watch them shoot from the lip and hit themselves in the foot. If, as they always say, politicians want to be judged by their words, let them be these.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Robson Press
• Release date: Oct 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781849544818

Phil Mason

Phil Mason has amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of cuttings and books chronicling bizarre stories. He is the author of Mission Accomplished! and How George Washington Fleeced the Nation. He lives in England.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

So here we are yet again. It will come as no surprise to those avid collectors who already have our earlier offerings, Read My Lips and Mission Accomplished!, that despite (or perhaps because of) the requirements of modern 24-hour news and social media, there still remain many, many politicians who discover themselves to be ill at ease with what ought to be their most honed and perfected asset – the mouth.

Is That Mic Off? is a further collection of magnificent gaffes, faux pas and idiotic utterings that have slipped from the lips of our elected governors (or in the case of WikiLeaks, from supposedly tight-lipped diplomats).

While the content is completely fresh, the patterns remain the same as before. We have idiotic blunders where the problem is ignorance, confusion or just plain mangling of language, and a selection of spoken catastrophes that really should have been prevented, as they were supposedly pre-scripted public pronouncements. There is, too, a surprisingly rich array of stupid ideas. If we elect our politicians because we feel they might have a better take than the rest of us mortals on how to improve the commonweal, time to think again.

We move to the more familiar and unsavoury traits of politicians – the slippery words, the deceptions, the backtracking (which does not necessarily entail admitting error or a change of mind). Sometimes it is history that does the undoing – a politician’s convictions, strongly held at one point in time, morph quietly into something very different later on. But they rarely tell us. We have to chisel out the past for ourselves, a service Is That Mic Off? thirsts to undertake. Sometimes, it is technology that undoes a politician. Microphone gaffes are here aplenty, when the private thoughts of public figures are exposed, showing them in a different light to the persona they cultivate on the public stage.

And then there is the audacity, the effrontery, the sheer bloody nerve of some politicians. Possibly, on ‘mature recollection’ (as a senior Irish politician once classically put it), a number of them regretted their words in the cooler light of day and would not be proud to have them replayed to them. Many perhaps remain immune to the shamelessness of their remarks. That is sometimes the character of the beast.

Three distinct recent historical moments form the concluding sections. The British general election of 2010, fought at the end of thirteen years of an increasingly wayward and maligned New Labour government (remember the unbounded optimism of ‘Cool Britannia’ in 1997?), produced an unexpected outcome: the first formal peacetime coalition government since the 1930s and the rapid eating of many pre-campaign words, particularly by the chief beneficiary of events, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, who suffered some tortuous contortions.

The United States is, as we write, engaged in its regular four-yearly mad-fest of sound bites, ‘debates’ and cross-continent campaigning. Mercifully for us, unlike their British counterparts who get the whole thing over in three weeks, Americans take nearly two years, so this investment account already shows a healthy balance, months before voting day. From supposedly the most sophisticated political system on the planet, there continue to stream extraordinary blunders, including, this time around, what one seasoned commentator called the most excruciating collapse of any politician in any debate since they began in 1960. Find it in Chapter 10.

Finally, there was WikiLeaks. To be honest, the release of a quarter of a million US diplomatic cables revealed little more than the regular traffic between embassies around the world and the home capital, full of the quotidian inanities familiar to anyone working in this arena – but they were eye-opening for the general public, laying bare an astonishing new world. Among the slough, there were inevitably some sensitive nuggets which had been intended to remain strictly confidential. We have done our own draining of the bog and offer a selection of observations that were certainly never meant to be put into the public domain.

The fact that we could do so from the comfort of our office is just one illustration of how modern communications technology presents such a challenge for our slip-up stricken politicians. Less than a generation ago, such a mass release would have been inconceivable, as it would have required the capture of the physical documents; certainly, researching them would have been a highly restrictive exercise requiring tangible access. Today, anyone and everyone has access and can scrutinise the material themselves.

The evolution of the media is laying down a frighteningly wide range of traps for politicians, and they are still behind the curve in their response – again, mercifully for collectors like us and you, good reader. A political strategist for the Democratic Party reflecting on this during the 2008 presidential election campaign mused on how the odds were now stacking up against politicos. ‘In the olden days,’ said Jenny Backus, the problem of a candidate saying something they later regretted ‘wasn’t an issue because if you said something that could be problematic, you just denied that you said it. These days, it’s too easy to have cold, hard proof.’

She was talking about the ever-present horde of film crews feeding the beast of the always-demanding 24-hour news channels and, an even more recent phenomenon, the amateur ‘gotcha’ stalker, always hovering and armed with a camera phone, able to load an embarrassing clip onto a social media site for the world’s consumption within moments. ‘You’ve got to have a strategy to combat the YouTube video,’ she added. ‘Now, one mistake can be replayed often.’

Options for response, she went on, boil down to two. Politicians can choose to stand firmly behind their comments, admit no mistake and simply motor on. This stratagem is based on the belief that to confess to having messed up, to apologise or clarify, shows weakness and muddle-headedness instead of strength and confidence.

The alternative is to accept the error, repent or clarify, and try to move attention quickly somewhere else. On the positive side, it can look honest, and convey a sense of being ‘only human’ rather than that worst of modern politicking, the political automaton. Too often, though, attempts to repair things leave the struggling politician looking like damaged goods; guilty of not being clear-minded; someone liable to wavering when the pressure mounts: not a good commendation for high elected office. Sometimes, too, as you will see many times in what follows, the attempt to put things right only makes things worse.

As you proceed through the collection, we’ll leave you to judge which approach tends to come out better in the dance with the verbal devil.

This volume draws its material from the capacity of politics to throw out ever-changing challenges to those who make the decision to take on the responsibilities of public life. We regale the equally consistent inability of many of that self-selected group to rise to those challenges. The essence of the battle was perhaps never better captured than by a politician you’ll probably never have heard of, Liberal MP Frank Owen, who had a spectacularly short political career – just two years – at the height of the Depression. He magisterially summed up the vicissitudes of political life: ‘In 1929, the wise, far-seeing electors of my native Hereford sent me to Westminster and two years later in 1931 the lousy bastards kicked me out.’

We continue to revel in the legions of would-be successors to Frank Owen who keep casting themselves into the public glare, slip gloriously, and leave us with an indelible contribution to our sort of political history. Long may they keep on coming. We’ll be here waiting.

Phil Mason and Matthew Parris

2012

1

‘I WISH I’D KEPT MY MOUTH SHUT…’

Politics is all about making an impression. Sometimes, it has to be said, it would have been wiser for politicians to follow the old advice of ‘don’t say anything unless it improves the silence’. Here follow some simple blunders, of the mind and the mouth.

I’m so glad to find you here, Lord Killearn, because I was told that your predecessor Lampson was an awful shit.

An

UNIDENTIFIED MINISTER

arriving at the British Embassy in Cairo in 1943 and being greeted by Sir Miles Lampson, the Ambassador, who had just been elevated to the peerage … as Lord Killearn.

•

If anyone had said fifty years ago that the people of our world would … tear down the Berlin Wall … no one would have believed it.

G

ORDON

B

ROWN

, speech to the Church of Scotland Assembly, May 2008. In a way, he was right – fifty years earlier the construction of the Berlin Wall still lay three years in the future.

•

My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason… For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific.

US President G

EORGE

W. B

USH

, speech to the Japanese Parliament, February 2002, appearing to forget the small matter of Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War.

Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.

B

USH

, speech at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 2003, appearing to forget that the US invented the nuclear bomb.

I have a record in office, as well. And all Americans have seen that record. September the 4th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It’s a day I will never forget.

B

USH

, memory lapse again, speech at Marlton, New Jersey, October 2004.

Mr Prime Minister, thank you for your introduction. Thank you for being such a fine host for the OPEC summit.

B

USH

, confusing his organisations at the Australian-hosted Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit, September 2007. Neither the US nor Australia are members of OPEC – the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries – the global oil cartel.

[He visited] the Austrian troops in Iraq.

B

USH

, same speech, mixing up his host again, recalling how the Australian Prime Minister had visited his troops in Iraq as Bush had done en route to the summit. There had been no Austrian troops in Iraq.

And over the centuries, [the United States and France] stood united in moments of testing – from the Marne to Omaha Beach to the long vigil of the Civil War.

B

USH

, getting into another historical tangle, this time on D-Day, in a speech at the 2008 commemoration ceremony. France was neutral in the American Civil War. Aides later said he ‘meant the Cold War’.

•

I think it’s important in life to speak as it is, and the fact is that we are a very effective partner of the US, but we are the junior partner. We were the junior partner in 1940 when we were fighting the Nazis.

UK Prime Minister D

AVID

C

AMERON

having his own Second World War moment, during a television interview in the United States, July 2010. Britain stood alone in 1940, and America only joined the war in December 1941. He later had to apologise to war veterans, saying he had meant ‘the 1940s’.

I think [Turkey will] be a good political influence because they can help us solve some of the world’s problems like the Middle East peace process, like the fact Iran has got a nuclear weapon.

C

AMERON

tripping up again, during a question-and-answer session in Hove, Sussex, August 2010. Iran (as of 2012) does not possess a nuclear weapon.

•

Teachers should allow them to miss classes… What is better – two days of geography or a day they’ll remember all their lives?

Government-harnessed anti-poverty campaigner S

IR

B

OB

G

ELDOF

calling in a radio interview on Radio Forth in May 2005 for Scottish head teachers to allow children out of school to demonstrate at the G8 Summit being held in Gleneagles that July – which, Geldof appeared not to know, was during the school holidays.

•

I myself have become convinced that the August bank holiday weekend – what some have called ‘the great British weekend’ – has the virtue of being in the summer, and already being a bank holiday.

L

IAM

B

YRNE

, Immigration Minister, June 2008, also getting his dates mixed up when he proposed creating a ‘Britishness Day’ which would promote ‘shared standards’ providing a social glue at a time of high immigration. He was unaware that the commonality of standards did not even stretch to celebrating the August bank holiday on the same day: Scots pointed out that north of the border, it was marked at different times in the month than in England and Wales. The idea sank without trace.

•

Over the last fifteen months, we’ve travelled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in fifty-seven states, I think – one left to go.

B

ARACK

O

BAMA

, showing that geography might not be his strong point, presidential election campaign, May 2008.

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries.

Nor history either… O

BAMA

, a week into his presidency, January 2010.

Senator Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.

A further geographically challenged O

BAMA

, when he was pitted against Hillary Clinton during the same campaign, seeking to explain why his rival was proving more popular in Kentucky, seemingly unaware that his own home state of Illinois actually borders Kentucky, while Arkansas does not, May 2008.

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honours its unbroken line of fallen heroes – and I see many of them in the audience today – our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

O

BAMA

, speech commemorating America’s war dead, New Mexico, May 2008.

•

I’m in House Chamber waiting for Netanyahoo to address Congress.

Senator C

HUCK

G

RASSLEY

from Iowa mixing up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an internet channel in a Twitter message, May 2011, illustrating the modern pitfalls of using social media to announce one’s importance (and ignorance).

•

When I meet with world leaders, what’s striking – whether it’s in Europe or here in Asia…

O

BAMA

, press conference during the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference summit that he was hosting in Hawaii, November 2011. Commentators found his slip-up hard to fathom, given that the Pacific US state was his birthplace.

•

We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq–Pakistan border.

Senator J

OHN

M

C

C

AIN

, who based his campaign for US President on the extent of his foreign experience, offering a confused geography lesson, ABC News interview, July 2008. Iraq does not share a border with Pakistan.

•

[Venezuelan President] Hugo Chávez has tried to steal an inspiring phrase – ‘Patria o muerte, venceremos.’ It does not belong to him. It belongs to a free Cuba.

M

ITT

R

OMNEY

, campaigning for the 2008 US presidency, trying to ingratiate himself with Florida Cuban exiles, March 2007. The tag, which translates as ‘Fatherland or death – we shall overcome’, was in fact the trademark sign-off at the end of speeches by Cuba’s communist leader, Fidel Castro.

•

[We will be marketing Ireland] as the innovation island – like Einstein explaining his theory of evolution.

M

ARY

C

OUGHLIN

, Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, in a speech outlining a plan for an ‘aggressive’ approach to developing Ireland’s ‘smart economy’, venturing an un-smart understanding of basic science, September 2009.

•

[One of the main island issues is] the building of the harbour wall at Achmore.

Hapless Conservative candidate S

HEENA

N

ORQUAY

campaigning for the seat of Western Isles in the 2010 general election. Aberdeen-born, she had fallen for a popular local ruse for tripping up non-locals. Achmore, set high in the centre of Lewis, is renowned locally as the only community on the island not to have a coastline. She lost disastrously in the election, finishing bottom of the field of five with just 647 votes – 4.4 per cent of the ballot.

•

If [English] was good enough for the Sweet Baby Jesus, [it’s] good enough for the schoolchildren of Texas.

M

IRIAM

‘M

A

’ F

ERGUSON

, first female Governor of Texas (1925–7 and 1933–5), rejecting proposals for teaching Spanish in the state’s schools (attrib.).

•

Today, we have two Vietnams, side by side, North and South, exchanging and working. We may not agree with all that North Vietnam is doing, but they are living in peace. I would look for a better human rights record for North Vietnam, but they are living side by side.

S

HEILA

J

ACKSON

L

EE

, Democratic member of the US House of Representatives for Houston, Texas, speaking in Congress in July 2010 and seeming not to know that Vietnam, a country the US fought and failed to keep divided, had been unified for thirty-five years.

•

I’m not aware of the problem… I’m not a politician.

C

LAYTON

W

ILLIAMS

, oil billionaire running for the Governorship of Texas in November 1990, speaking to a journalist who had asked him for views on locally controversial and widely publicised proposals for changing the way the Governor appointed members to public boards and commissions, adding an unusual explanation for not knowing. He lost.

•

Iqualuit.

C

ANADIAN

P

RIME

M

INISTER’S OFFICE

, misspelling the name of the capital of Nunavut, the autonomous indigenous Inuit territory of northern Canada, on its official press releases covering a visit of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in August 2009. It should have been Iqaluit, which means ‘many fishes’. Iqualuit is a local derogatory term for ‘people with un-wiped bums’.

•

Yes, I’ll make it quite clear, fiscal, F-I-S-K-A-L.

Australian Senator S

TEVE

F

IELDING

having his ‘potatoe’ moment, explaining to reporters his views on the economy, September 2009. He had earlier been noted for often mangling his pronunciation of the term as ‘physical’. The exchange was captured on camera.

•

Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we’ve been bombing over the years been complaining?

Alabama Governor and four times runner for President, G

EORGE

W

ALLACE

, date unknown.

•

I am … saying that … because I’m in Germany… I’m in Alsace.

N

ICOLAS

S

ARKOZY

, French President, making a toxic gaffe when visiting the (French) Alsatian town of Truchtersheim, near the German border, in January 2011. He appeared to have forgotten that the province was now in France, having been fought over by France and Germany for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As far