By Julian Glover

Friday August 26, 2005

MPs need to learn to speak "fluent human" the BBC's Andrew Marr said yesterday, after five frustrating years trying to translate political jargon into language that makes sense to voters.

The former political editor, who takes on Sir David Frost's Sunday role later this year, said many MPs lacked the power to speak "crisply, clearly and vividly".

Speaking at a lecture in Edinburgh yesterday, he said: "The trade of politics is at least 40%, maybe 50%, about communication. But quite a lot of people can't communicate. They can say interesting things, but they don't say them in a way that arrests or grips today's audience".

Many politicians were not trained in addressing public meetings or the law courts. MPs had to learn how to make their point quickly on television. "It's tricks; it's not difficult," Marr said later. "If there is nothing you want to say in 20 seconds, then don't do it".

"George Galloway is a brilliant, brilliant orator in a room but not the greatest in a TV studio," he said as an example.

Marr, who recently published a book on journalism, said the media was also at fault for preferring sensationalism to traditional reporting. Newspapers should try covering "some of the slightly more boring things", he said.

Even that did not impress the former Labour minister Tony Benn, who said the problem was with TV culture.

"The media have allowed themselves to get sucked into the government machine," he said. "They stand outside No 10 in the morning and the House of Commons in the afternoon and tell us what the government wants us to know instead of going out and meeting people themselves.

"This idea it is all about presentation is wrong," he said. "Journalists say that MPs are all clones. But when one says something interesting he is marginalised and called a troublemaker".