I’m not quite sure when it happened, but at some point over the past year, politicians’ language was taken over by a sort of corporate speak. Corpspeak, as it has been informally called, is a dead-eyed repetitive white noise that sounds like a cross between someone reading a PowerPoint presentation and a lawyer answering questions on behalf of a client they cannot trust to speak for themselves. Most guilty of it is Rishi Sunak, a man who has probably said the word “deliver” more than any other during his premiership. Sunak is, above all, “focused on delivering for Britain”. Have any questions about Scottish independence? Sunak’s answer is that he is focusing on the things he can do to “deliver here for people in Scotland by working constructively together”. Just suffered a wipeout at the local elections? You guessed it, delivering is the answer. After those local election results he had a rousing moment of self-reflection that he shared with the nation: “The message I am hearing from people is that they want us to focus on their priorities and they want us to deliver for them.” Asked to reflect on how he feels when he loses, Sunak replied: “My focus in this job is to deliver for the country.” Starmer has his own version of this sort of CEO-on-an-away-day patter. “Joined up” thinking, “sleeves-rolled-up” partnerships, “laser-targeted” policies and “mission-driven” politics will all underpin Labour’s next manifesto. Compared with Sunak, though, Starmer is a poet, not afraid of a metaphor, but there is no risk of them bringing a tear to your eye. Launching Labour’s five “national missions” earlier this year, Starmer said that there is a global race to achievement, and: “Britain must be on the start line – not back in the changing room tying its laces.” But it is Rachel Reeves who has really embraced corpspeak, and in doing so demonstrated how much this type of pabulum has entirely devoured detail, rhetoric and even basic coherence among the ranks of political leadership. On a big launch of brand Reeves in the US, and to show that, with Labour, Britain is “open for business”, the shadow chancellor went on Bloomberg to explain Labour’s new big idea – “securonomics”. When asked what that was, Reeves replied: “Securonomics is an approach that builds on the contributions of more people in more parts of Britain and with a more secure national economy, taking advantage of some of the big opportunities but also ensuring our resilience, our strength and our security, to give families that security that they desperately crave right now.”
Corpspeak isn’t just about saying as little in as many words as possible. It also has a style and attitude. Autocue delivery even when there is no Autocue. Unblinking eye contact with the camera or the interviewer to conjure up the earnestness absent from the responses. Variations of “look, let me be clear” or “look, I’ve been clear on this”, whenever pressed on detail, to steer things back to the non-answers already given. The overall effect is an elaborate pleading of the fifth. There are some common themes to these addresses. The political arena of polis, power and institutions providing checks and balances has been replaced with targets, key performance indicators and clients. For Labour, the clients, “hard-working families” and “ordinary working people” (those not in gainful employment clearly can’t afford Labour’s services), are not being served well by the current executive team and deserve better value for their money and hard work. For Sunak, the executive team under his leadership is strong, but is being frustrated by a non-commercially minded board made up of civil servants and woke lefties, and a media too focused on trivial matters such as Suella Braverman’s serial indiscretions, rather than important things like his performance at G7 meetings. Both their political visions are rendered in bullet-point format. Sunak is “delivering … against five priorities”. Starmer has ditched the language of pledges – understandably, as pledges have a vexatious tendency to sound like “promises” that people will then want to hold you to, and make a judgment on your character if you renege. Instead, he now has long-term objectives and goals that will be “measurable” so voters can check against performance. There is a moment in the film The Truman Show when Truman, who has no idea that he has been the subject of an elaborate reality TV show since his childhood, grows frustrated with his wife, who regularly slips into chirpy praise of household items they are using. Unaware that she is advertising goods for the show’s sponsors to a hidden camera, he asks: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?” This is how it feels to hear politicians talk about delivering, missions and securonomics. Who are they talking to? In the answer to that question might lie an explanation for the creep of corpspeak. They are not talking to anyone in particular, but trying to address what they perceive as their weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Sunak knows he’s only where he is because his predecessors soiled the bed. And so he must appear at all times to be deep in spreadsheets, delivering, putting as much distance as possible between himself and the former regime’s economic adventurism, and the one before that and its partying in lockdown and reckless Brexit rhetoric and posturing – both of which still cast a long shadow on his government. But he also knows that he doesn’t have enough of a mandate in his own party, nor the appetite to take on the Tory right, so can’t stray too far into the territory of making a break with that past that still stalks him. Boxed in by history and his party (and, to an extent, his own personality), his political messaging must shrink to repeating his slide deck of priorities.
Labour is haunted by two things: its 2019 loss of the “red wall” and Starmer’s own ombré transition from Corbyn-adjacent leftwing pledge-maker to self-declared leader of a party that has become “the real conservatives now”. That history must be erased and disavowed by proving that the party is not hostile to business or private interestsand that it has no intention of challenging what it believes to be the desires of those voters who left the party in droves: performative patriotism, tough talk on security and a hard line on immigration. In achieving these goals everyone must stay close to the rebrand script, and not allow a stray remark to be seized upon by the rightwing press or the Tories to portray Labour as a party incapable of “changing its DNA”, as Starmer has promised. In short, both parties’ messaging reflects the fact that there is now agreement on their political project – an economy driven by government partnership with private business interests that serves people in work, with savings, mortgage payments or home-owning aspirations, and a culture that resists Britain’s demographic and racial changes. That settlement strangles alternative visions of the future, which challenge the primacy of the markets and the relentless nativism of powerful rightwing media. Along with that our leaders become mere vessels for the consensus, unable to be authentic, to ad lib, to speak to us directly from the heart. Corpspeak has taken over not because politicians are hiding something, but because they have nothing to say. Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist