THERE'S probably some kind of name for it in the medical textbooks. The condition of not being able to deliver a speech without throwing in some inappropriate metaphor or lame gag. If there is a vaccine available for it, would someone please administer it to the PM?
Today’s offering at COP26 was sadly no exception to the rule - he opened up talking about Scotland’s “most globally famous fictional son, James Bond” which suggests he has managed to conflate the Ian Fleming original with the late Sean Connery, the only Scotsman to inhabit the role on film.
The laboured metaphor continued throughout, with the conference being urged to find the right wire to defuse the doomsday machine which would blow us all up. One of the regular twitterati asked in some despair who wrote his speeches.
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I’m assuming it’s a DIY job. How else to explain some of the excruciating and laboured comparisons he comes up with? Last week at the G20 it was suggesting – with a backdrop of the Colosseum – that we risked suffering the same decline and fall of the Roman empire which also suffered from unfettered immigration.
Cue a raft of outraged historians and classicists telling him he was barking up the wrong analogy, that the Roman Empire collapsed from totally different causes, and that, in any case, there were precious few borders back in their day. Carry on up the Coloseum, Boris.
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Then there was a previous speech to the United Nations in New York, where he channelled Kermit the frog in a homily about green being good which left the General Assembly collectively bemused.
Fortuitously, in Glasgow, there were other speechmakers on hand to deal with real and present dangers in stark detail.
Antonio Guterres (below), the current UN General Secretary, made a typically hard hitting contribution and there were powerful young voices from Samoa and Nigeria.
The nonagenarian David Attenborough really socked it to the delegates apparently without notes, and with the aid of some really powerful visual evidence and personal testimonies.
The burden of Prince Charles’s offering was that the private sector had to ante up some hard cash to supplement what governments could offer developing countries unable to transit without contributions from the main polluters. I suppose if you want to twist arms up backs, a touch of regal “persuasion”wouldn’t go amiss.
If there were emergent themes from all these speeches it was the thought that not only was the upcoming generation mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, but they would be unforgiving of any backsliding; any failure to make COP26 a significant pitstop en route to saving the planet.
There seemed a palpable sense of urgency throughout all the speeches, not always the case in gatherings with a tendency to specialise in platitudinous hopes.
The First Minister was on hand, but without a platform to speak. You suspect somehow she won’t miss the chance for some heavy duty networking in a Blue Zone for which some of the great and the good found themselves queuing.
READ MORE: COP26: What it was like inside the Blue Zone on day one of the summit
No China and no Russia of course, but the Indian premier is here and he straddles both the worlds of contemporary polluting and that of those countries who have inherited the cost of our previous inability to stop trashing our own habitats. Or, as Guterres starkly put it, because we continued to dig our own graves.
President Biden, bizarrely given the post-lunch graveyard slot, displayed the right instincts without the eloquence or passion of the previous Democratic President.
He majored on how innovation and enhanced technologies could turn catastrophe into opportunity and, not least, “good paying union jobs.” But he too saw this COP as “the challenge of our collective lifetimes”.
“Let’s be ready”, he concluded, “to answer history’s call”.
Amen to that thought.
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