Neil Shah, founder of the Stress Management Society and International Wellbeing Insights, has delivered leadership training which includes how to read non-verbal communication. We watched the YouTube video of the speech remotely over a video call, so that he could analyse it blow by blow. He told me he would be interpreting a blend of signals because 55% of our communication is through body language, 38% is volume and tone and only 7% is the actual words we use.
‘Twenty-six seconds in and you can see the tension in his fingers,’ Shah commented. ‘He is clenching so hard his knuckles turn white.’ He pointed out Johnson was hunched and leaning forwards like he was holding on for dear life. I asked what it means when someone clenches their fists so hard. He told me it can be for emphasis, or as an aggressive gesture, but ‘it also looks like a tantrumming toddler. The way he is jabbing his fists at us shows tension.’
Johnson also gives the most awkward and uncomfortable smile when he talks about compliance. Shah added that ‘it’s almost threatening. We smile when things are funny, but also when we are nervous. When he said that no prime minister wants to do this, a grave look would have suited the moment better than a ghoulish grin.’
Like Murphy, Shah thought the prime minister didn’t believe everything he was saying: ‘There doesn’t seem to be congruence between his words and his body language. It suggests he is not speaking from the heart and doesn’t believe what he is saying.’
Both believed his body language was more consistent with his words when he was discussing the impact on the NHS, but was incongruent when he was being more authoritarian in his message. The eyes never lie, so they say, even when the mouth does, and these conversations with Murphy and Shah proved to me that body language doesn’t either. The prime minister of the UK would probably have been professionally coached to give the speech of his life, but the body betrays emotion and conflict regardless.
Unprompted, both experts offered astonishing analogies. Murphy likened Johnson’s speech to ‘a forced hostage speech’. Shah asked if I could see the resemblance to the episode of Black Mirror (the British dystopia sci-fi TV series) where the prime minister must be filmed for live TV having sex with a pig. I could see what they both meant.
Hindsight provides another level of analysis. We know the thrust of the message was not true. We did not lock down for three weeks. The reason we locked down was ostensibly to flatten the curve, but the mission creeped and we stayed in lockdown. We also now know that the curve might have flattened anyway, regardless of lockdown, since deaths peaked on 8 April, meaning infections peaked before lockdown.2 When Johnson told us we would shut down the country for three weeks, the authenticity of his body language shut down too, his language and posture forced and aggressive.
Johnson’s words were designed to call fear and death to mind: ‘invisible killer’, ‘lives will be lost’, ‘funerals’, and so on. He told us we were ‘enlisted’ – very specific wartime language, evoking the Blitz spirit, but also emotionally manipulative. At this point, Shah pointed out that we weren’t given a choice, so we were conscripted rather than enlisted. Actually, there was no room for conscientious objectors, so I’d go with press-ganged.
My experts and I found this video difficult to re-watch. With time the performance grates more and the words have acquired a bitter taste. Ultimately, whether you believe Johnson gave the most heartfelt and honest speech of his life, or was coached too hard and over-egged it, or was misleading us, it was a frightening speech. His words set the tone for the three weeks to follow and hovered in the air for many months. As Murphy said to me, ‘You can’t under-estimate the amount of imprinting this speech would have created.’ Johnson released a certain amount of fear that night, like an airborne virus, and you caught it one way or the other. Maybe you believed every word and it was an apocalyptic pandemic that would bring society to its knees. Maybe you were suspicious of the motives behind the inauthenticity, and perhaps there was an agenda that you feared would bring society to its knees. But it was frightening.
We were told we must follow the rules to ‘save many thousands of lives’. Threats littered the latter part of Johnson’s speech. The police would have powers to enforce the rules; we must follow the rules. The threat of power and penalty is designed to frighten us into compliance. But in a dishonest departure from the rule of law, the ‘rules’ he was ordering us to obey would not be made law for a further three days.
We didn’t know this. The nation took the prime minister seriously from that night. Deadly seriously, just as we were supposed to. Murphy told me she hadn’t observed Johnson’s body language very closely on the night because she was listening so attentively to what we must do. This is a natural response. He is the elected leader of the country. Authority figures command respect, even in today’s jaded world. Psychologically, there is a reason for this.
When we’re in panic mode our body directs less blood to our blood-hungry brain and more to our limbs so that we are able to fight or take flight as needed. As a result, when we’re threatened the brain needs shortcuts; ways to make decisions quickly. On the most obvious level, we listen to authority figures and leaders, and want to trust them in a time of crisis. We also respond to ‘archetypes’. Our elected leader fulfils the archetypal role of ‘ruler’ and at a time of crisis – the archetypal Jungian motif for this crisis would be ‘Apocalypse’ – we are even more primed to listen and obey in order to survive.
In fact, the priming had started weeks earlier.
