Article 2MNYF After-dinner mint: how ex-politicians hit paydirt with public speaking

After-dinner mint: how ex-politicians hit paydirt with public speaking

by
Larry Elliott and Jill Treanor
from World news | The Guardian on (#2MNYF)

Barack Obama, George Osborne and David Cameron can all now command six-figure sums for a few pithy bon mots from the podium. But what do their audiences get out of it?

When Barack Obama banks the cheque for $400,000 he will receive for talking to an audience of Wall Street bankers and their most important clients in September, the former president might like to quietly thank the statesman who did so much to pioneer the idea of the celebrity political speaker: Winston Churchill.

More than 70 years ago, in March 1946, Churchill - recently ousted as prime minister - turned up at Westminster college in Fulton, Missouri to present his views on the state of the world. The audience in Fulton certainly got more than it bargained for, because Churchill used his lecture to coin the phrase that came to describe the cold war: Britain's wartime premier- with US president Harry Truman in the audience - described how an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, from Stettin on the Baltic Sea to Trieste on the Adriatic.

Continue reading...
External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location http://www.theguardian.com/world/rss
Feed Title World news | The Guardian
Feed Link https://www.theguardian.com/world
Feed Copyright Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. 2024
Reply 0 comments