I, Cameron

This is the first post in a short series analysing how the PM changed his rhetoric right after he got into government. It compares how a number of themes are presented in his campaign speeches vs his early speeches as PM, based on close, statistical, linguistic analysis.

Taken from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7682813/General-Election-2010-David-Cameron-
makes-last-ditch-appeal-to-Labour-voters.html (26/05/2012; 23:00)

‘...we have called this manifesto an invitation to join the government of Britain...People power not state power. Big Society not big government. We're all in this together.’ - David Cameron, April 13th 2010

So said David Cameron as he launched his election campaign back in 2010. But how did that work out for everyone? Certainly his continued assertions that ‘we’re all in this together’ put some of us on constant alert, in case Cameron and his team decided to bust out some poorly-judged homage to High School Musical. Or maybe that was just me.

But what happened once he got into office? Well, I’ve been looking at how Cameron himself puts things, in his speeches, and started to see something interesting.

Before the election, Cameron is constantly using ‘we’ and ‘your’ - ‘we all’, ‘we’ll...make sure you are in charge’, and ‘your government’. ‘We’ is pretty much is most used word during the campaign. He even goes as far as saying, ‘we’re’ not ‘really fighting Gordon Brown or Nick Clegg.’ So, we're all one big happy family, then? Yet, once we get past the election, stats show that Cameron uses ‘we’ far less (and generally to refer to the government, not the public) - and ‘your government’ is consigned to the Steve Hilton’s bottom draw, along with ‘your community’ and ‘your country’.

In their place, we got a lot more ‘I’ and ‘me’. Cameron seems to shift into a presidential role. No longer your friendly neighbour who you’re ‘in it together’ with. Instead of inclusively saying ‘you’ and ‘we’, now it’s ‘you’ and ‘I’ that start to appear together. Cameron starts talking about what ‘I know’, ‘I can’, and ‘I believe’.

Suddenly - having railed against the idea that ‘politicians...know best’ in his campaign - Cameron now seems to want people to leave it to him, and to trust him, specifically. Before the election, Cameron distanced himself from his own party (talking about a future ‘Conservative government’, rather than the ‘Conservative party’ of the past and present’) - and afterwards he seems to distance himself from the public. It’s not uncommon for PMs to do this - but with his party in a delicate coalition, and a perception that he’s an ‘arrogant posh boy’, perhaps he’d do well to be a little less presidential?

Comments always welcomed.