Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS JACKANORY POLITICS TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Frances Stonor Saunders Producer: Innes Bowen Editor: Hugh Levinson BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 21.02.08 2030-2100 Repeat Date: 24.02.07 2130-2200 CD Number: Duration: 27’ 44” Taking part in order of appearance: Lord Gould of Brookwood (Philip Gould) Prof Drew Westen, Professor of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta; author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding The Fate of the Nation. Richard Maxwell, author (with Robert Dickman) or The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster & Win More Business Robert McKee, storytelling expert and author of Story. Daniel Finkelstein, Associate Editor of The Times, former adviser to William Hague MP. Robert Halfon, former adviser to Oliver Letwin MP, Conservative Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Harlow. Mark Easton, BBC Home Editor. Kevin McConwy Associate Dean and Senior Lecturer in Statistics, The Open University STONOR SAUNDERS: Are you sitting comfortably? Are you prepared to be inspired? ARCHIVE: MAN FROM HOPE 1992 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION FILM (Music) ARCHIVE BILL CLINTON, MAN FROM HOPE, 1992: I was born in a little town called Hope, Arkansas, three months after my father died. GOULD: The man from Hope is the greatest narrative commercial ever written. It must be. ARCHIVE BILL CLINTON, MAN FROM HOPE, 1992: And I remember just thinking what an incredible country this was; that somebody like me who came from a little town in Arkansas, who you know had no money, no political position or anything, would be given the opportunity to meet the President. WESTEN: Bill Clinton told a story that was about him, about how he was a man from Hope. He was literally born in Hope, Arkansas. It was about him in relation to the concept of the American Dream. ARCHIVE BILL CLINTON, MAN FROM HOPE, 1992: Late at night on the campaign plane, I look out the window and think how far I am from that little town in Arkansas. And yet in many ways, I know that all I am or ever will be came from there - a place in a time when nobody locked their doors at night, everybody showed up for a parade on Main Street, and kids like me could dream of being part of something bigger than themselves. STONOR SAUNDERS: This is where we start our story about storytelling in politics. We all tell stories about ourselves and the world we live in, it’s just that some of us do it better than others. Bill Clinton’s campaign ad, broadcast in 1992, took the art of narrative as a political strategy to new heights. It was immediately enshrined by other politicians, and those who advise them, as the sacred text of political storytelling. It was surrounded by a body of people who wanted to learn its secrets. They saw what it did for Clinton, and they wanted a bit of it. GOULD: People would say we need a narrative. That’s to say what we need is an explanation of what is going on that gives meaning to events. STONOR SAUNDERS: Philip Gould was an adviser to New Labour on communication and strategy, and a key architect of Tony Blair’s style of leadership. As he explains, building a master narrative is not simply an exercise in rhetoric. GOULD: He would use his life as a narrative device. I mean he used to like to wear you know very fashionable clothes, often ridiculed, because he felt - I don’t think many people know this - but he would always want to use modern, British designers, he’d always want to use smart clothes because he felt that was part of modern Britain. His basic narrative is modern Britain. I mean he wanted Britain to be a modern country, so he would do anything for that. And he always had a very, very strong sense of his own political narrative and his personal narrative as well. He did have that. STONOR SAUNDERS: Why are politicians so drawn to narrative? What about those events and emotions that don’t fit the structural requirements of a story, those messy bits and pieces of life that we can’t account for? Are we falling for the charms of story at the expense of the facts? The idea of taking us back to a fact-based politics occurred to Iain Duncan Smith, who, as Tory Party leader in opposition, determined that Prime Minister’s Question Time would be a much more effective democratic process if it was stripped of narrative. ARCHIVE IAIN DUNCAN SMITH, PRIME MINISTER’S QUESTIONS: Will the Prime Minister tell us whether teacher vacancies in schools have gone up or down in the last year? (27 Feb 2002) What should patients do if their local hospital has no stars in the Government’s rating system? (16 Jul 2003) Will the Prime Minister tell us whether train delays due to track and signal failures have gone up or down since he pushed Railtrack into administration? (12 Dec 2001) STONOR SAUNDERS: (yawns) Sorry, but that was boring, a hundred per cent decaffeinated. Iain Duncan Smith’s experiment was a comprehensive failure, a box office bellyflop. Politicians who take the laundry-list approach generally fail to attract people to their ideas. The way to sell policy seems to be to build a story into its very design. Richard Maxwell is a corporate consultant whose company motto is ‘Story as Strategy, Storytelling as Leadership.’ MAXWELL: We define a story as a fact wrapped in an emotion that compels an action that produces a change. The question then is what makes one story compelling and another story less compelling? We state that stories have five elements: they have the passion with which you tell them; a hero, which provides a point of view for your listener to make the story their own; a problem the hero is confronting, an antagonist - sometimes that’s personified as a villain, but it’s really just an obstacle; a moment of awareness that allows the hero to overcome that obstacle; and the change that occurs. Quite often people leave out the moment of awareness because it’s somewhat subtle, but great storytellers always put it in. STONOR SAUNDERS: This journey into awareness – the penny drops moment – was artfully recounted in a speech by Tony Blair in 1996. ARCHIVE: TONY BLAIR, LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE 1ST OCTOBER 1996 I can vividly recall to you the exact moment that I knew the last election was lost. I was canvassing in the Midlands on an ordinary, suburban estate. I met a man polishing his Ford Sierra - self-employed electrician, Dad always voted Labour. He used to vote Labour, he said, but he’d bought his own home, he’d set up his own business, he was doing quite nicely, so he said, “I’ve become a Tory.” He wasn’t rich, but he was doing better than he did and, as far as he was concerned, being better off meant being Tory too. And in that moment, the basis of our failure, the reason why a whole generation has grown up under the Tories became plain to me. You see, people judge us on their instincts about what they believe our instincts to be. And that man polishing his car was clear. His instincts were to get on in life and he thought our instincts were to stop him. STONOR SAUNDERS: Of course Tony Blair could not possibly predict with certainty from this encounter the collapse of Labour’s election chances. But as a story constructed with hindsight, it obeys perfectly the rules of a compelling narrative: Blair has pitch-perfect passion, and casts himself in the role of protagonist tilting against an obstacle (Sierra Man, the archetypal Labour voter who is defecting to the Tories). Blair then arrives at the moment of awareness, the revelation, which provides the opportunity for transformation. McKEE: Narrative, story is a mirror of memory. When a human being thinks back to the past and tries to put their life together in some fashion, they cast their life into a little classical tale in order to make sense out of their life. STONOR SAUNDERS: Robert McKee is an internationally recognised expert on how narrative is structured. After a brief spell as a screenplay writer, he devised a three-day seminar on the art of storytelling that has been oversubscribed for decades. His findings have been distilled into his book, ‘Story’. McKEE: You see you can’t stop the mind from trying to organise life, and it’s going to organise it in causal chains with a beginning, middle and end. And it can dip in and out of that, it can play with it, but you can’t stop the mind from trying to make sense out of life by casting it in some kind of a story. STONOR SAUNDERS: The bit that concerns me a little bit is what do you do with the elements of life that are not plot-driven, that might even be anti-plot; that are just chaotic, messy, unbiddable and not accountable to any kind of dramatic formulae? McKEE: Yes, well you see politicians have never dealt with the chaos of life. They’ve never dealt with it rhetorically or dramatically. The chaos of life is simply ignored because the attitude of all politicians is that there are problems that we are solving as we speak or that we have plans to solve, and so the messy bits of life just are not included in any discussions of politics. STONOR SAUNDERS: McKee doesn’t run courses for politicians, but politicians are not ignorant of his arguments. Daniel Finkelstein, while a policy adviser to then Tory leader William Hague, read McKee’s book ‘Story’ on holiday, and rushed home to share its insights with Hague. FINKELSTEIN: I explained that one of the reasons the media weren’t interested in us is that we were literally boring. We were what would be boring on the screen. We were what would be boring in a book and naturally it was also boring in a newspaper article. And William Hague was saying, “Do we want to have a ballot on whether the Conservative Party supports the Euro? It’s a bit of a risk.” And I said, “If you take the storybook seriously, yes you should have a ballot because the only way that people will know who you are is through the transformation that takes place in your character through a real narrative, going from a situation where the party is disunited, going through the challenge of an election, and ending with a united party, with the party being transformed in between.” Obviously you don’t decide serious matters of national policy purely because they represent a film script, but you do have to have a sense of a character being transformed by the things that he does as well as an explanation of what you stand for through theories and things like that. STONOR SAUNDERS: There it is again, the moment of awareness (Finkelstein reading the book) leading to a transformation (Hague agreeing not to be boring). As it turned out, the change was more about style than content. Hague did hold the ballot, and he trounced his rivals, the pro-European former ministers Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine. But it made little impression on the public, and did nothing to improve Hague’s fortunes as leader in the long term. Hadn’t Finkelstein and Hague merely arrived, belatedly, at what ordinary people have long recognised as spin? FINKELSTEIN: This form is not the spinner’s way of looking at the world. This is the actor’s way of looking at the world. This is the way of looking at the world that says you progress and explain who you are through action. So this idea of narrative, far from being the empty creation of public relations experts, is really about the doing and the action and transforming characters through action and not simply telling. It’s the antithesis of public relations spin. STONOR SAUNDERS: After Thatcher, successive Tory leaders struggled with the perception that they were actors in a bad drama, unable to transform the character of their party. Something was rotten in the state of Denmark – and admitting it was the obstacle. Something Theresa May, then Conservative Party Chairman, overcame in 2002. ARCHIVE: THERESA MAY, CONSERVATIVE PARTY CONFERENCE, 7TH OCTOBER 2002: You know what some people call us: the Nasty Party. I know that’s unfair, you know that’s unfair, but it’s the people out there we need to convince. STONOR SAUNDERS: Theresa May, like Tony Blair after his encounter with Sierra Man, had awoken to the realisation that the narrative wasn’t working. Her party needed to tell a different story. Belief in a small state was no longer motivated by tax cuts for a greedy middle class but by a desire to embrace an overlooked voluntary sector, succeeding where government bureaucrats were failing. Robert Halfon, who worked as a policy adviser for the shadow home secretary at the time, was involved in this major plot change. HALFON: I have always believed in the power of voluntary groups, social entrepreneurs to transform people’s lives. Just as business entrepreneurs transform the economy, I’ve always believed that social entrepreneurs can transform society. STONOR SAUNDERS: A favoured technique of policy wonks looking to engineer such transformations is to find engaging stories, rich in anecdote and emotion, that illustrate what they’re trying to achieve. Often, though not always, this involves drawing on examples in North America, like this one as described by Halfon after a trip to a drug rehabilitation centre in Boston. HALFON: We sat in a house in a run-down area full of former prostitutes and crack addicts and I met a lady. She was a pregnant lady, a former prostitute. She had been abused as a child. She had been pushed out onto the streets. She had been on crack cocaine from the age of thirteen, and she’d had an unbelievable, miserable life being bullied by pimps. And somehow she had something in her, a little spark that said go to this place. And she went there as a complete wreck. And when I went there she was smart, she was dignified, she was advising some of the other people who had just come in and she was ready to face the world. And it was all thanks to that organisation. STONOR SAUNDERS: Here was a party transforming itself, turning itself into a redemptive force, by telling stories of personal redemption. EASTON: All the political parties buy into this idea. There is no real Westminster opposition to this thought. This is about trying to make bad people good. STONOR SAUNDERS: BBC Home Editor Mark Easton has been looking behind the scenes at the government’s newly-launched ten-year strategy for getting people off drugs. EASTON: The Government’s narrative on drugs treatment has been it’s a no-brainer; that every £1 we spend on drug treatment saves the country £9.50. So when I began to ask the questions about actually how many people do come off all illicit drugs at the end of this treatment programme, they did give me a figure; and my calculations showed that, much to my astonishment, it was less than 3%. It was about 2.9%. And what this did is threw them into a complete spin because their whole story was treatment works, and it was a story of bad drug users, bad people who are burgling our homes and upsetting the locals. We put them into treatment, these dirty people get cleaned up and come out and everything’s lovely. Actually that’s not what was happening at all. STONOR SAUNDERS: I mean there’s one interpretation of this quite you know shocking revelation if you like about the truth about drugs rehabilitation, which would be that this is just you know politics at its cynical worst, that there’s sort of some form of skulduggery going on in twisting figures or producing figures that don’t tell the whole truth. And there’s another story that in a sense conflicts directly with that, which is that actually there is a benign motivation behind all of this, which is an overwhelming desire to believe in the redemptive narrative, if you like; that we can carwash you know these dirty elements of society and turn them into something clean and pristine and return them into society as valuable and cherished members. What’s your view when you were doing this story of which of those two forces, if either, was working? EASTON: I don’t think there was a malign motive here. I think there was a genuine attempt by ministers to try and sort out the drugs problem in Britain. STONOR SAUNDERS: The motives are good and the narrative is a positive, aspirational one, much preferable to the hopeless reality Mark Easton happed upon. So why let the facts get in the way of a good story? Kevin McConwy is Senior Lecturer in Statistics at the Open University. He’s long been intrigued by why we often favour story over logic and hard facts. He used me as a guinea pig, repeating an experiment originally devised by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky. McCONWY: What Tversky and Kahneman did was that they made up some little stories about some fictitious people and then they gave these stories to various individuals and they asked them on the basis of the stories to say how likely various statements about these imaginary people were, and then they looked at how relatively lightly they made these statements. STONOR SAUNDERS: So can you try one out on me then? Can you give me an example of one of these tests? McCONWY: Yeah, I certainly can. So here’s the description. It’s about Linda. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. And then I’ll just try some of the statements on you. So the first one is Linda is active in the feminist movement. STONOR SAUNDERS: Okay, yeah I think that’s probably likely. McCONWY: Okay, next one. Linda is a bank teller. STONOR SAUNDERS: I don’t think that’s particularly likely. McCONWY: Okay and then finally Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. STONOR SAUNDERS: I suppose that covers more options - so, yeah, I would say that’s probably the most likely. McCONWY: Right, okay. What happened when Kahneman and Tversky tried the same set of questions out on these Canadian undergraduates was that the vast majority of them said it was more likely that Linda is a bank teller and a feminist than that Linda is a bank teller. So they said the same sort of thing that you just did. STONOR SAUNDERS: So what’s the problem with that? McCONWY: Well the problem with that is that in logical terms, in rational terms it can’t possibly be correct. The probability that they’re a bank teller has to be bigger than the probability they’re a bank teller and a feminist because there are more possibilities in bank teller than there are in bank teller and feminist. STONOR SAUNDERS: Yes, yeah, alright I can see that … yuh. McCONWY: Most people can see it when it’s explained to them in that sort of way, though it has to be said Kahneman and Tversky went on to do a whole lot more experiments, in some of which they did spell it out like that and people still got the thing in what’s logically the wrong order. STONOR SAUNDERS: When presented at a conference on political forecasting with similar probability tests, the majority of experts was also fooled. This made me feel slightly better, but it does point to an alarming conclusion: the merest incidentals of story can make something feel plausible, where logically or statistically it is less probable. Mark Easton again. EASTON: There is a sort of national narrative that crime is going up, that everything’s getting worse, and the newspapers - and broadcasters to a large extent too - really like that and it plays in to what people think is the story about crime. And the reality is that crime’s been falling in this country for over ten years and indeed your chances of being a victim of crime today are lower than they were since the records were started in 1980/81. Now the interesting thing there is that the current government has been rather caught out over the last few years because they’ve wanted to change the story. They’ve wanted to say crime is coming down, but they also recognise that fear of crime is still really high because people believe the traditional narrative. So they know they can’t just say look you’re all wrong. Remember that old story? That’s not right. The new story is crime’s coming down and the world’s getting better. No-one will buy that because they’ve been selling the other story for so many years. So they’ve now got this really difficult position, which is crime’s coming down but we recognise that there are still many, many challenges and in some places there is a serious problem with crime, and the whole thing just kind of gets muddy. Meanwhile the opposition politicians of course are all going with the traditional line, which resonates absolutely with voters who say, yeah, that’s what’s happening down my neck of the woods. STONOR SAUNDERS: This is bizarre: first we cling tenaciously to implausibly optimistic narratives of redemption, and now we’re all going to hell in a handcart just because that makes for a better story? The data say one thing, and we possess the tools to weigh the evidence, to calculate the costs and benefits. But the attraction to narrative acts like a riptide, dragging us away from the shores of logic and reason. This appears to trouble Gordon Brown, who opened his premiership with a much-heralded commitment to stem the constant nosebleed of Westminster spin and over-narration. That’s not to say that he has discarded narrative altogether. Rather, he just doesn’t seem to be a very good storyteller. Drew Westen is a professor of psychology and author of ‘The Political Brain’, which has quickly established itself as required reading in British political circles. WESTEN: Gordon Brown has sought the counsel I understand of the American strategist Bob Shrum who is a wonderful speech writer except that he has never understood how narratives work and why you need to use them and in fact just wrote a wonderfully meandering book that is called ‘No Excuses’, but could easily have been called ‘No Narrative’ because it has no structure of a narrative, of what it’s about. And if you’re naturally a policy wonk, you’ve got to have someone in your camp who can help you think about how you turn things that sound like they’re dull and boring into things that are not only emotionally compelling but do have that story structure that make people able to listen and remember what you’ve said because if you want to win elections, you have to appeal to the human mind, not to the mind of a calculator. MAXWELL: We can’t remember things if they don’t have emotions. STONOR SAUNDERS: Story telling consultant Richard Maxwell again. MAXWELL: You know I was talking with Jerome Bruner who’s one of the fathers of cognitive psychology, and I said to him, “You know, does everything we remember have to be locked in narrative?” And he said to me, “Oh no, no, you can remember telephone numbers, you can remember things that you have to repeat all the time, but you are twenty times more likely to remember something which has emotional resonance and is locked in narrative than anything else. This is how we deal with reality.” STONOR SAUNDERS: As literary critic Barbara Hardy wrote: ‘We dream in narrative, day-dream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticise, construct, gossip, learn, hate and love by narrative.’ We can’t attack the form, but what about the content? What defence does reason have against the juggernaut of emotion? Drew Westen. WESTEN: If you think about what has led human beings to their most horrendous atrocities, if you think of the genocides in the last century and the ongoing genocides, it is appeals to emotion. And that’s what made the Enlightenment philosophers so terrified of emotion - that and of course the appeals to religious authority without any basis in reason which role essentially appeals to emotion. So I’m with you as being a rationalist - I actually do research and I don’t just say hmn, let me feel the data. You know I … But the flipside of it is that we are not only moved to our most horrific acts as humans, but we’re moved to our most exalted ones as well. I don’t remember Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a plan’ speech, but I do remember ‘I have a dream’. And you did it in a way that brought out people’s better angels on race and that got them beyond the emotions that are fundamentally behind prejudice. And the chink in the armour of the Enlightenment story is that it takes a reason to reason, and that reason is always emotional. It’s always about caring about your kids, it’s about caring about your country, it’s about caring about people who are disadvantaged, it’s about caring about the earth that we leave our children and our grandchildren. STONOR SAUNDERS: This argument could be taken by politicians as an inducement to aim for our hearts, more than our minds. But in doing so, they can stray into falsehood. Remember Tory Minister Jonathan Aitken’s stirring performance in 1995, when he cast himself as a modern St George wielding his sword of truth against the dragons of lies and corruption? Well he was subsequently exposed as a liar, and sent to prison. It’s not all about lies that make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. There was Tony Blair’s petty deception when he told his constituents that his favourite food was fish and chips, only to declare to the authors of The Islington Cook Book that it was in fact ‘fresh fettuccini garnished with an exotic sauce of olive oil, sun-dried tomatoes and capers’. A man can have two favourite meals, of course. But can we believe in his appearance in two stories – the bloke from Sedgefield, the discerning gourmet from North London – at the same time? Much more exciting is the story told about President Mitterand by journalist and political commentator Daniel Finkelstein. FINKELSTEIN: Francois Mitterand when he was an opposition politician ended up on the front page having been shot at while driving in his car from a restaurant. He dived behind a wall, the bullets didn’t kill him, and the next day it was a huge story in all the newspapers. And Mitterand was a hero until it was revealed that he’d actually paid a man to attempt this assassination. And the man managed to prove actually that Mitterand had done this because he’d sent a letter to himself, this gentleman, explaining the whole plot in advance. And so politicians can become too desperate, I think, for colourful stories. STONOR SAUNDERS: It’s rare for politicians to concoct such high octane drama. But it’s hardly surprising that voters become confused as to what is real, and what is a contrivance. ARCHIVE: HILARY CLINTON 8TH JANUARY 2008. And some people think elections are a game. They think it’s like who’s up or who’s down. It’s about our country and it’s about our kids’ futures. STONOR SAUNDERS: When Hillary Clinton, trailing in the polls in the recent New Hampshire primary, almost broke down, suspicions were raised. ARCHIVE: HILARY CLINTON 8TH JANUARY 2008. I just don’t want to see us fall backwards, you know. (voice breaks/applause): STONOR SAUNDERS: Here was the foot-weary political candidate, a contemporary Ulysses slugging it out against adversity, knocked down, but getting up again to push onwards to the ultimate goal, and winning against all odds. What a great story. ARCHIVE: HILARY CLINTON 9TH JANUARY 2008. Over the last week, I listened to you and in the process I found my own voice. STONOR SAUNDERS: A compelling narrative trip through awareness into transformation. So does it matter whether or not Hillary’s tears were real? Robert McKee again. McKEE: Story is morally neutral. You can tell it to lie or you can tell it to express the truth, but the content of it is the responsibility of the storyteller. STONOR SAUNDERS: Okay, so there’s nothing wrong with the form? It’s to do with content? McKEE: Look, you can lie either way. You can lie rhetorically by twisting statistics, concealing facts, manipulating data in information in order to draw false conclusions to persuade people to something that is false. You can lie that way, okay? Or you can lie by telling a story, but it is more difficult to lie when telling a story because if you’re really going to tell a story well, you have to admit the negative side. When politicians only give you data, they ignore everything that contradicts what they’re trying to say. MAXWELL: If you go out and you try to tell a false story, a story you do not have emotional connection to, it’s not going to work and your emotional connection is what makes those facts meaningful to you. The facts are either right or they’re wrong. If they’re wrong and you try to dress them up, you know you’re putting a pig in a tuxedo - it’s just not going to work and don’t even bother. STONOR SAUNDERS: How reassuring story-telling expert Richard Maxwell is. After all, none of us is fooled by a pig in a tuxedo. The truth will out. There is a happy ending after all. Or is that just another story? Where is this addiction to story going to end? Drew Westen. WESTEN: In some ways, I hope that what it ends with is - and I say this as a partisan progressive - that both sides will get equally adept at telling stories, so that we have a genuine debate about where our nation, where your nation, where our world needs to go, where we won’t be fooled by Orwellian tactics on one side because the other side will be smart enough to catch them and talk about them and tell a good story about them. STONOR SAUNDERS: Do we really need more storytelling in politics, rather than less? Hasn’t narrative already become something of an obsession, a kind of middlebrow structuralism that poses as a grand theory of life – what we might call Narrationism? Narrationists need story, just as Creationists need Genesis. (segues to) ARCHIVE: MAN FROM HOPE 1992 DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION FILM (Music) ARCHIVE BILL CLINTON, MAN FROM HOPE, 1992: I still believe in the promise of America and I still believe in a place called Hope. (Music suddenly ends) SONORS SAUNDERS: No, no, sorry. This may be the end of the story, but I feel I’ve let myself down – I haven’t experienced the moment of transformation. I’ve tried, I really have, but I still feel reluctant to surrender my tiny patch of neural turf to the political storytellers. Stir my passions, by all means. Inspire me to exalted action. But leave me with the comfort of knowing that two-plus-two still makes four.