The rules of interrogation have changed for the body politic

Body language has its limitations as a predictor and as a qualifier for high public office, writes Terry Prone

Not joking you, the cat and the budgie are driving me to drink. Every time the man in my life turns on the television, there they are. One unappealing and somewhat menacing cat. One inconsequential canary. The first time I saw them, I didn’t realise it was an ad. I thought maybe I’d happened upon a documentary and was transfixed by them being so close to each other with the implicit danger to the tiny bird. Maybe the cat grew up with this canary. Maybe they go back to when they were kitten and egg, so to speak, but don’t tell me even the most budgie-friendly cat won’t have a sudden regression to feral feline if it’s a bit peckish and a trustful budgie is within paw-swipe.

As the days went on, I realised it was an ad and further realised that it was probably the most annoying ad ever made, predicated as it is on the bird and the cat making their typical noises at high volume at their male owner until he eventually gets the message that his electricity is cheaper as a result of his wife shifting from one energy supplier to another. Cheep/purr. Cheep/purr. Got that, have you?

In sharp contrast to the charming girl who dates the guy who keeps a pet pig, neither the bird, the cat nor their owners are particularly endearing. The woman is sharpish. The guy is not just thick as a plank (it takes him forever to work out the message his animals are sending him) but cowardly with it. And the blue tiles in their kitchen make you wonder how any cat of taste would continue to live there. (Budgies are cute but have no aesthetic sense. Trust me on this.) The point about this maddening ad is that it is superb. It’s as effective as a brain tattoo. It gives you an earworm for half a day every time you hear it by virtue of the simple, drive-you-crazy-repetition of the key message: Cheep Purr. Cheaper, Cheaper.

Right now, of course, every candidate in Fine Gael at the moment is behaving like a human version of the cat and the budgie. If you switch on the light, they say “Keep the Recovery Going.” This is about as popular with the hacks as the bird/canary are with me. Last Thursday, the night of the leaders’ debate in TV3, a political correspondent friend rang me, spitting teeth with fury about how the Taoiseach had arrived and immediately started on about the recovery.

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“So boring,” my friend said, sniffing a long reproachful sniff imputing responsibility to me for this, which imputation would be untrue. “So on message.”

I had a mad urge to ask him if he’d expected the Taoiseach to get intellectually speculative in the TV3 foyer about the innovative approach taken by Peruvian cattle dealers to artificial insemination.

“It’s just like before the last election,” my friend went on. “D’you remember him and his five-point plan?”

“Will you ever forget him and his five-point plan?” I asked. The irony slid past him on oiled blades, as did the fact that the approach he was decrying as failing to serve the high boredom threshold of journalists works perfectly when it comes to setting up a repeating cognitive loop in the listeners’ heads. Cheep purr. Keep the recovery going. Cheep purr.

Gerry Adams used repetition too, in the TV3 debate, but with rather less success. Gerry has the old verbal bully device of repeating the same phrase the way police forces throw down spikes to attack the wheels of getaway cars: sooner or later one of them will puncture the tyre and it will grind to a halt. Gerry seems to think that monotoning the same phrase underneath a Joan Burton monologue will collapse her tyres. Not going to happen, Gerry. That woman’s tyres don’t ever collapse. We suspect they’re solid rubber.

Good manners were reestablished in TV3 after the politicians went home. The two people who talked about social media didn’t interrupt each other at all. They were, in fact, mutually courteous and appreciative. What they said was that some of the politicians got mentioned more than others on social media and they had the statistics to prove it, although not, as far as I could see, any attributable significant arising therefrom. But that doesn’t stop a general enthusiastic unevidenced belief that this election will be partly won on social media. That’s such a safe prediction. Like “It’s all to play for.” Or “This is Fine Gael’s to lose.”

Once the social media name-counters were gone, the funniest moment of the evening happened. That was when Ivan Yates demanded Pat Leahy’s take on the body language of the debate and Pat Leahy’s brain boggled while we watched. Irish viewers — indeed TV3 viewers — may, late on Thursday night, have witnessed the most perfectly formed brain boggle ever seen on camera. You could could almost see Leahy testing out a response like “Well, Enda Kenny wags a classy fountain pen, and Gerry Adams has an offensive forefinger” but baulking at the last minute at the prospect of trying to make either observation seriously relevant to the discussion.

Having done a good full frontal boggle and looked down the barrel of the body language question, Pat Leahy decided he wasn’t having any of it and answered a quite different question. Now this was very sensible of him, particularly since Ivan Yates takes a somewhat Biblical approach to the questions he poses. He casts them upon the waters and doesn’t seem to care that much about the responses they evoke. He never does a Paxman, forcing people to answer the specific question as posed. In this instance it was just as well, because body language has its limitations as a predictor and as a qualifier for high public office. Were it otherwise, the inestimable Mary Robinson’s infinitely repetitive meat-chopping gestures would have prevented her from ever becoming President of Ireland.

What was particularly interesting about Pat Leahy rejecting an incoming questionand moving on to ask and answer one he preferred (because he had thought it up all on his own) is that a politician who did the same would be hung, drawn, and quartered. The rules of interrogation as applied to commentators are radically different, in tone, content and pace, from the rules of interrogation as applied to politicians.

Interviews with commentators are invitations to be interesting. Interviews with politicians are invitations to make a public confession. Somewhere along the line the notion developed that openness and transparency on the part of politicians is best fostered by a KGB approach involving a naked light bulb, extensive sleep deprivation, and a central assumption that everybody in the room knows the guilt of the person interviewed.

And that even if they won’t fess up like an ordinary decent criminal, their body language will tell on them. In a Dublin, Mayo, Cork, or Belfast accent.

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