As I watched the Finance Minister give an almost four-hour-long Budget speech on Monday, sympathy spittle started forming at the corners of my mouth.

I got parched in his stead, and started downing one glass of water after the next, while watching him read on and on and on. I could not bring myself to budge from in front of the television. Will he go hoarse? Will he sit down? Will he ask for a whisky? Will he ever round up? Is it humanely possible to give such a long speech?

In the end, he clocked three hours and 42 minutes – the longest Budget speech in the history of Malta. He does not, however, get the award for the longest parliamentary speech: that’s Dom Mintoff’s. During the Mintoff-Sant-Cottonera saga of 1998, Mintoff once prattled on for some six-and-a-half hours.

Never-ending speeches are not a Maltese trademark: they have hit the headlines internationally quite a few times.

The longest speech given before the UN General Assembly lasted four hours and a half, by none other than Cuba’s Fidel Castro, in 1960, in which he rambled on about ‘The Denouncement of Imperialism and Colonialism’. It was not Castro’s longest speech though: his 1986 address to the Communist Party Congress took seven hours and 10 minutes.

Castro does not, however, hold the record for the longest political speech ever. The honour goes to Indian politician V.K. Krishna Menon, who at the UN Security Council in 1957, talked for nearly eight hours defending India’s position on Kashmir.

It’s almost a tie with Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chavez. Once he went on his regular TV talk show, Al Presidente!, and subjected viewers to a political speech which began at 11am and ended more than eight hours later.

There is some kind of psychology behind these long speeches. Oxford University professor Robert Service says: “You are only ever going to get long speeches when the speaker doesn’t have to worry about the audience running away.”

Which was very much the case last Monday. MPs could not go anywhere, not with the yearly event of having cameras in the parliamentary chamber: they had no other option but to stay put and try their utmost not to doze off. As Prof. Service says: “The speaker banks on the good manners of the audience.”

You are only ever going to get long speeches when the speaker doesn’t have to worry about the audience running away

In fact, our Finance Minister was only allowing himself to pause for three to four seconds to gulp down some water. I suppose it was risky to stop any longer than that lest everyone start thumping on the benches with relief that it was over and quickly file out of the house.

Incidentally, not everyone drinks water when delivering speeches. Others resort to special concoctions. The UK Chancellor drinks whisky while reading the Budget. And in 1853, UK Prime Minister William Gladstone delivered the lengthiest Budget speech on record, clocking four hours, 45 minutes, while drinking a mixture of egg and sherry.

It would have helped if the newly elected American President William Henry Harrison sipped some whisky during his inauguration speech in 1841. He spoke, ad nauseum, about ancient Roman history, for two hours in a snowstorm, wearing neither a coat nor a hat. His bravado got him pneumonia and he died within a month, marking the shortest American presidency.

A clear example of how the length of speech is utterly pointless is an 1863 speech by the American politician Edward Everett. He spoke for two long hours to a distinguished crowd at Gettysburg. Then President Abraham Lincoln stood up and gave a memorable three-minute address, wiping out all of Everett’s speech from everyone’s memory.

Sometimes long speeches end up being longer because of the in-between applause. In the book Gulag Archipelago, author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentions how at a party conference, someone toasted Stalin and everyone stood up applauding, even though he was not in the hall. After 11 minutes of clapping, a member of the audience assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. That same night, he was arrested.

Luckily, last Monday, the thumping on the benches was contained; everyone was keen to get home.

Perhaps it’s a consolation for the Finance Minister that he is far off from the Guinness world record of long speeches: the longest speech stands at 48 hours and 31 minutes, given by Vickrant Mahajan in India, last September. His speech covered a total of 392 different topics.

Mahajan was taking part in a speech marathon. I am a bit wary of mentioning the word ‘mara­thon’, lest our President, the nation’s chief fund-raiser, cocks her head to one side, shows an interest and turns it into a President’s Speech Marathon.

One long speech a year is enough.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @KrisChetcuti

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