Kmflett's Blog

The art of dealing with the political heckle from Wilson to Reeves & Keir Starmer

Rachel Reeves speech to the Labour Conference in Liverpool on Monday was interrupted by a heckler. He was making a point about selling arms to Israel. Far from answering him with an effective riposte(although in this case its difficult to see what that might be), Reeves waited while security bundled the heckler out of the hall, while noting that Labour was a party of power not protest. The current Labour Party no doubt but historically it has managed both, depending on context, and found them to be linked

On Tuesday towards the end of his speech Keir Starmer was heckled about the deaths of children in Gaza. The heckler was removed and Starmer’s riposte was that they must have thought they were at the 2019 Conference. It didn’t engage the audience, which is what an effective response to a heckle does, and in fact just less the issue of Starmer’s Gaza policy hanging in the air.

It reflects the reality that while there are still very good public speakers out there, very few are to be found in Parliament, where MPs have mostly given up on the idea of engagement with a mixed audience.

Arguably the tradition survives virtually with the social media riposte.

One master of how to deal with the political heckler was Harold Wilson. Addressing a crowd in Birmingham in 1966 Wilson was talking about his public expenditure plans when a heckler cried, “What about Vietnam?” – the burning issue of the day. “The government has no plans to increase public expenditure in Vietnam,” rejoined Wilson. Heckler: “Rubbish!” Wilson: “I’ll come to your special interest in a minute, sir.”

The key to it is both an immediate response, but also a witty one that demeans the heckler and gets the audience on the side of the platform speaker.

I’m no great fan of Wilson, Starmer or Reeves, but in a democracy, both heckling and responses to it have a role to play that doesn’t involve calling security.