George Osbourne and the communication skills of the shadow cabinet

I thought George Osborne’s speech yesterday was pretty average. To be honest I couldn’t sit through it all, it was too boring. Potentially the content was OK, although predictably short of details but this is probably fair enough for an opposition party. No, it was the slightly self congratulatory manner and the frankly droll presentation style that made me switch off. The whole Cameron/Osborne thing is so reminiscent of the Blair/Brown show it’s frightening. In this case, Blair and Cameron being great communicators, and Osborne and Brown coming across as, well, pretty wooden really. That said, I thought it would be interesting to look at the communication skills of the wider shadow cabinet, to judge whether they have the support network to back up Cameron. I haven’t included the less prominent shadow cabinet, only the ones I’ve seen relatively frequently in the media. The scores on the doors: Cameron 9/10 Osborne 5/10 (Sorry George) Hague 7/10 (As long as he’s not the leader he seems to come across well, forgetting that dreadful speech at the party conference as a 15 year old!) Alan Duncan 4/10 (OK at times but can’t resist the odd patronising comment) Liam Fox 8/10 (Probably underused) Dominic Grove 8/10 (Now, he’s had some media training in recent years. His presentation style has changed out of all recognition.) Ken Clarke 9/10 (Always better with a cigar!) The rest of the shadow cabinet, with the possible exceptions of Theresa May and David Willets, don’t really have sufficiently regular public exposure to warrant a rating. (Happy to be corrected on this; this list is purely my interpretation as a news consumer. We’ve conducted no quantitative analysis on it.) So, what’s my conclusion? Well I’d say they are pretty good. The PR machine of the Tories is well organised these days which means that the best media operators get most of the high profile media opportunities. What they decide to do with Osborne will be most interesting. Somehow Cameron’s persona seems to get him off the Eton slurs, but when Osborne speaks it’s hard to get emotionally involved with what he’s saying, and you can almost picture those Eton robes flowing down his back.