Language

The accents of politics

DEBORAH CAMERON

There’s something very odd about the way some Tones talk. So peculiar are the accents of present-day conservatism, they have become a kind of leitmotif in parliamentary sketch-writing - you can always get a laugh out of Michael Howard’s ‘peepil’ or John Major’s ’wunt’, just as you can always raise a smile by mentioning Michael Fabricant’s hair. Indeed, Mr Fabri- cant’s hair and Mr Major’s or Mr Howard’s pronunciation have something in common: each is apparently trying to pass for the ’real thing‘, but each misses the mark in such a way that it appears not just artificial but posi- tively weird. What is going on?

Accent, in Britain, is closely connected with social class. The most pres- tigious English accent, known as ’Received Pronunciation’ (RP), was de- fined by the phonetician Daniel Jones as the pronunciation of southern English people who have been educated at public schools. In fact you can hear it from Perth to Penzance; it is not a regional but a class variety, used by slightly less than 3 per cent of the population. The natural accent of the Conservative party, then? In theory, yes; in practice, though, it is striking how many senior Tories - Major, Howard, Malcolm Rifkind (that ‘speech community of one’, as a Scot of my acquaintance aptly called him) and, before them, Thatcher and Heath - seem ill at ease with the accent of power and privilege. They sound, in fact, as if they are putting it on.

In some cases this is a question of class. Major, Thatcher and Heath all had lower-middle-class origins: RP is not their native accent but something superimposed on it later. Heath’s original vowel sounds still show through the Path6 newsreel announcer veneer; Thatcher did a better job of elimin- ating her provincial origins, but there is something archaic about her RP, as though she were modelling herself on Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter. John Major is a slightly different case, more modern but less educated than his predecessors. A south Londoner whose speech retains several features of the variety which has come to be known as ’Estuary English’, he also shows signs of the phenomenon that linguists call ’hypercorrection’, which is associated in particular with the socially and linguistically insecure

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lower-middle class. Speakers who hypercorrect are aware that a certain pronunciation is regarded by the socially privileged as a solecism, a sign that the speaker is ‘common’ or provincial, and they try hard - too hard - to avoid it. For example, it is well known that RP speakers say grahss with a long vowel rather than grass with a short one, as northern speakers do. So the insecure northern speaker will carefully correct the short vowel to the long one - even in cases where RP has the short vowel too (like fantastic - no upper-class speaker says fantahstic). John Major’s wunt is a case of phonological hypercorrection.

But there is more to the hypercorrectness of John Major’s speech than his pronunciation. The least bookish of politicians, he talks like a book: more exactly, he appears to believe that any appropriate public use of language must approximate to written language. Thus he regularly speaks as if he were reading from an invisible set of committee minutes, occasionally enlivened with a dash of nineteenth-century fiction. The effect is a not in- considerable strangeness.

Recall, for instance, the celebrated election broadcast ’The Journey’, in which Major returned to his roots in Brixton. Though its purpose was to present the Prime Minister’s human side, the language of ’The Journey’ was almost robotically stilted: full of uncontracted verb forms (’that is where we lived’, ‘it is very exciting’) and those quaintly elaborate turns of phrase that so often make Major sound like a pompous twit in a Monty Python sketch (‘I used to occasionally erect a soapbox . . . some [people] used to engage in badinage’). While ’The Journey‘ may have been scripted down to the last dot and comma, it is notable that Major produces the same kind of language even in spontaneous public utterances; sketch-writers and impressionists make comic capital out of the all too plausible idea that he talks like this in more intimate moments too.

If it were only John Major, one might explain the hypercorrection as one reflex of the social change whereby the Conservative party has been taken over, in Julian Critchley’s phrase, by estate agents: it is no longer exclus- ively for the traditional landed gentry and the Oxbridge-educated pro- fessional elite. But what are we to make of Michael Howard? The son of East European immigrants, Howard nevertheless belongs to the Clite educationally and professionally; yet his pronunciation, including his trademark ’1’ sound (as in ’peepil’) instances a particularly bizarre kind of hypercorrection. The variety of English which his ’1’ recalls is Irish English: phonetically it is the same phenomenon which causes the Irish pronunci- ation of ‘film‘ to sound to English ears like ‘fillum’. (RP does have this ’1’ sound, but never at the end of a word.) Inserted into an otherwise RP-like form of speech, it sounds preternaturally careful, as though Howard were

Language: The accents of politics 95

trying to avoid a sound (the so-called ’dark 1’) which he imagines to be sloppy or coarse. Where on earth did he get this notion?

The artificiality of several leading Tories’ English might suggest this is not, to paraphrase one of John Major’s more memorable soundbites, ’a language at ease with itself’. Rather like the Tory vision of England, Tory English is a contradictory affair: it oscillates between nostalgia of the old- maids-bicycling-to-communion variety (the cut-glass gentility of Alvar Liddell and Celia Johnson) and the Thatcherite ethos according to which it is money that talks - loudly, and probably with an Essex accent. These linguistic ideals are incompatible: which leaves the present generation of Tory politicians with a problem. They can’t get away with sounding like Ken Livingstone, but it’s no longer an unqualified virtue to sound like Harold Macmillan. They must try to converge on some middle ground, and in their self-conscious attempts to find it (whether they start from the ’posh’ side of the line, like Michael Howard and Malcolm Rifkind, or from the wrong side of the tracks, like John Major) they end up with the linguis- tic equivalent of Michael Fabricant’s hair.

It is not surprising if speech remains a source of anxiety for many people in British public life, for research continues to give credence to George Bernard Shaw’s observation, made in 1910 in the preface to Pygrnalion, that ’it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him’. Verbal bigotry is part of our national heritage. But one could argue that linguistic snobbery, like so many other aspects of the nation’s culture, ain‘t what it used to be: it has been overlaid, though not supplanted, by other kinds of prejudice. The result is a double bind. A speaker may try to avoid one negative judgment (that their pronunciation is ’vulgar’) only to run into a different prejudice, against ways of speaking which are perceived as inauthentic.

This, in fact, has always been an integral part of English accent prejudice. Since medieval times, commentators have reserved their strongest dis- approval not for nonstandard dialect per se but for the pretentious who try unsuccessfully to ape the speech of their betters. (Chaucer satirises the East End French of his Prioress in The Canterbury Tales; Shaw’s Henry Higgins, asked if he can make a living by altering people’s accents, replies that it pays handsomely, since ‘this is an age of upstarts’.) When media pundits ridicule John Major’s way of speaking, they may simply be recycling this traditional, snobbish view. But perhaps the old disdain for inauthenticity as the mark of the ’upstart’ has been transmuted into a more modern contempt for fakes and phonies, which is no longer exclusively about class.

It was surely not just old-fashioned snobbery (or for that matter inverted snobbery) which led many peopie to detest the sound of Margaret Thatcher’s

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voice, in some cases even more vehemently than they detested her politics. The ’makeover’ of Thatcher’s speaking style by image-doctors like Ronald Millar and Gordon Reece was a matter of public record; and I think a significant section of the public found something repellent about the notion of manufacturing a voice in such a calculated way. The way someone speaks (’expresses themself’, as we tellingly put it) is taken as indexical of who they are. Tinkering with your speech has connotations of pretending to be someone you are not; which in the case of a politicians is likely to be viewed as manipulative, as mere opportunism. This is not just about ’upstart’ pretensions, for the downwardly-mobile version (Ken Clarke’s mateyness or Malcolm Rifkind’s tortured attempts to sound Scots) is as suspect as its more traditional opposite.

It is interesting, therefore, that the things commentators pounce on in the speech of John Major or Michael Howard are precisely those that smack of the inauthentic, the unspontaneous and the calculated (compare this with the more affectionate response to John Prescott’s incoherent confer- ence speeches, which are taken, rightly or wrongly, as spontaneous and authentic expressions of who Prescott really is). It’s a paradox, really: in the age of the soundbite, of the image consultant and the spin doctor, of the ’sincerity machine’ which allows you to read a speech and look on TV as if you are delivering it off the cuff, we know perfectly well that poli- ticians‘ speaking personae are carefully manufactured; yet it is precisely the illusion of spontaneity and authenticity that we most want our poli- ticians to manufacture. Currently, Conservative politicians seem to be struggling with this task. Perhaps the odd way many of them speak be- trays a deeper anxiety about who, in the 1990s, they want - or wunt - us to think they really are.