One of the most interesting aspects of UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s public persona is the way he appears to see his public role. For a very prominent politician, his approach to public speaking is odd. He stands before his audience and says things at it with little obvious attempt to use rhetorical devices other than the words themselves.
Starmer seems to make little attempt to engage, persuade or amuse and almost no attempt to read his audience and adjust to its mood. As we all know, it is possible to talk for effect or talk to convey information and usually whatever we say, it’s both. With Keir Starmer it’s neither and it’s strange.
Starmer doesn’t talk to convey information and neither does he talk for effect, except perhaps in a very wooden and unconvincing manner, as if he expects the unadorned words to create the effect. It doesn’t work and Starmer appears to be the only person who is unaware of this failing.
Some people talk for effect to the exclusion of information except as a prop for the effect. Some people appear to talk to themselves in this way, directing the persuasive effect at themselves. It’s the internal conversation we call thinking. Starmer seems to do it all the time.
When he talks at an audience, Keir Starmer seems to be addressing himself, reiterating wooden thoughts in a wooden manner suited to his wooden nature. Perhaps this is why he constantly fails to disguise his habit of talking at an audience rather than to it. As if his audience is never quite real to him, no more real than an erratically insubordinate dream.
