シャドーイング練習: Rory Stewart reveals MPs have tried to kill themselves over job - ‘Miracle they aren't dead’ - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ
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Rory Stewart, it's good to see you.
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We got elected back in 2010, different parties at the same time.
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We're veterans together.
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We went through the ringer together.
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We really did.
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Your list of achievements is far more impressive than mine.
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You are a former diplomat.
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You're a former Conservative cabinet minister.
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You're a former Tory leadership candidate, your co-host of the most successful politics podcast,
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an academic, and this book comes out the day after this is broadcast.
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And I really enjoyed it.
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And I'm going to talk largely to you about your experiences that you've detailed about your time in Westminster in the book.
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But first of all, I just want to ask you, do you wish you were sitting here as Prime Minister?
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Yes, I do.
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I think it would have been a pretty tumultuous ride.
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It's not been easy.
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Brexit, COVID.
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But I felt that we had a real opportunity in 2019 to try to bring the country together a bit more.
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I felt it was terribly kind of divided and fractured.
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A friend of mine just pointed out that in the opinion polls, when you and I were in Parliament,
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50% of people who voted Remain said they wouldn't speak to someone who'd voted Brexit and vice versa.
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And only 25% of either side were prepared to allow their children to marry someone from the other camp.
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So I really felt that what we needed to do is bring people together, not get into this horrible standoff of us against them.
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Do you see a future role for yourself in politics?
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I think it's difficult.
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I mean, you know, you know politics just as well as I do.
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I'm not somebody who's in a very easy position with parties.
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I sadly broke with the Conservative party because I belong to a tradition of a much more,
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I guess, centrist, more traditional conservatism.
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And so I don't feel comfortable in the direction the party's going at the moment.
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Same time, obviously, I'm not a Labour supporter because I have very traditional views about the world.
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So I think unless we change our electoral system, and it's one of the things I want to encourage, I think these parties are basically old, dead and broken.
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And the only way to actually bring some new fresh ideas in is to do what New Zealand did, which is to change their electoral system,
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a bit more proportional representation, smaller parties coming in.
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Have you decided who you're going to vote for next year?
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I haven't, no. Usually when I get really stuck, I'm afraid I give up and vote for the Lib Dems.
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Okay, so let's talk about this memoir that you've written about your time in politics.
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You're very critical of Westminster, but you're also critical of yourself.
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And I've got picked out a few quotes to illustrate this.
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Let's start with the real person I despised in all of this.
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This is when you were in your first term as a Member of Parliament.
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The real person I despised in all of this was myself.
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Why?
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Well, I'm, as you say, I'm quite critical of colleagues, but what I want to explain is that I was as bad, if not worse, than all of them.
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I think what Westminster does, and I don't know whether you felt this, because you came in with a very impressive career before you came into Parliament,
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is it often takes people who outside Parliament are actually reasonable people, right?
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Very strange.
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You know, I came in with people who were successful doctors, colonels in the army, business people,
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writers, historians, academics, and within a few months we were all these sort of being treated like school children by the whips.
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It's a very very odd system, nothing is what it seems, it's like Alice in Wonderland.
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You're making speeches in the House of Commons Chamber and literally nobody's listening, you know all your colleagues are on their phones except maybe your mum
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and even she gives up pretty soon with listening to your speeches in the House of Commons.
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And you realize that the whole thing is basically about creeping up to your bosses.
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I rebelled against David Cameron when I was early on in my time in Parliament.
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And George Osborne said, if you rebel, we're not going to promote you for five years.
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Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal, I guess, to the public listening.
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They're like, fine.
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But actually, you've come into Parliament to try to do things and make a difference.
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And to spend five years stuck on the back benches watching Liz Truss, who joined at the same time as you,
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becoming a cabinet minister, because you've rebelled once.
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And you end up, and this is why I ended up despising myself, I would find myself sort of creepily trying to sit next to David Cameron at lunch.
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And I'd send these texts saying, you know, congratulations on your latest policy that I didn't really believe in.
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And so I began to feel that I was being made in my early 40s into some kind of child.
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And one of the things that you say in the book about sending texts, about praising the Prime Minister's latest initiatives,
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you say texts which even now make my ears burn with embarrassment.
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You feel a sense of shame at how you behave.
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Because, you know, I like you and I like many members of Parliament, you know, I'd been the acting governor of an Iraqi province responsible for three million people, been a Harvard professor.
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I'd run a charity in Afghanistan.
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I thought that I was a reasonably substantial person.
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And I realized that as soon as I became an MP, all that's wiped out.
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Nobody takes you seriously anymore.
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I remember this guy called Archie Norman, who was the chief executive of ASDA, came to the House of Lords.
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Yeah, big figure.
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Yeah.
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And you would have thought that if you'd been the chief executive, I'd run a huge supermarket chain.
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People take you seriously.
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I remember all my colleagues saying, oh, we knocked him down to size.
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You know, we made him wait in the corner of the tea room.
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We didn't promote him.
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We showed him that it's it's literally there are some wonderful people in Parliament and people I really loved.
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And I've praised a lot of them in the book.
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But there is also a group of people who are very, very bitter unfortunately,
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mostly men, feel passed over and feel that their basic mission in life is to try to humiliate other people.
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You don't need to name names.
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I'd love you to.
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Did you feel, were there occasions when you felt you were being humiliated by colleagues on your own side?
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Yeah, and actually on every time.
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It's a very odd process.
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I remember, for example, when I was elected to become chair of the Defence Select Committee.
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So, you know, this was quite a big honour for me.
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I was first term MP.
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I'd stirred Labour MPs, voted because I'd turn up for my first day to chair my committee.
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And there's a sort of mutiny.
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And these older MPs say, we demand that you never speak again to the press without our permission.
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And I'm thinking, well, is that a thing?
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Are they allowed to say that?
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Am I missing some unwritten rule of parliament?
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The truth was they're just making it up.
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They have no power at all to control my ability to speak to the press.
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But they're all sitting there having worked this all out amongst themselves because they're angry.
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They're angry that they've stood to be chair of the defense committee
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when I've been elected and they want to knock me down a peg or two.
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It's a very, now, why does this matter?
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It doesn't matter in terms of me.
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I mean, obviously it's irrelevant, you know, my funny fragility, vanity, ego.
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What matters is that what that means for when these MPs become ministers.
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If you treat people as children, if you treat them as though they're incompetent,
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lazy, dishonest, you do not prepare them to take responsibility seriously
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and properly And I felt when I was eventually sitting around the cabinet table
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that the 10 years of kind of hazing, sort of.
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Schoolyard hazing doesn't produce proud, independent, confident decision makers.
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Right.
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Even when they're at the cabinet table, they're still sending creepy texts to the prime minister, hoping they can get a slightly more senior job at the cabinet.
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Right.
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Given everything you learned, I recognize a lot of what you say in it from my own experience.
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I want you to give some advice to the MPs, the new MPs, because it's only going to change from within,
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who get elected next year.
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How can they stop becoming these terrible creatures?
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So you and I came in at the end of the expenses scandal, and I thought that was a huge opportunity that we missed.
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I think all of the 2010 M-takes should have come together and said, actually, what was going on was disgusting.
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we're going to sign up to a code of conduct, we're not going to behave like this other lot.
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Instead of which, everybody was so delighted to be elected, they immediately wanted to be just like the people before.
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So I'd like to see the new MPs do that.
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I mean, I'm interested, I'd like to put it back on you, though, because you went through exactly the same thing.
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And I worry, writing the book, that I'm going to come across as completely sort of bitter and unfair, because I'm more critical upon.
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But do you feel it resonated with your experience?
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It did.
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And actually, I think people, the machine expected me, because I'd been a television presenter,
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to be able to go out and advocate the party line a lot more.
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But what I realised is that I couldn't remember lines
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that had been written by somebody else and could make them look natural.
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So I said, hang on, I have to step back.
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It's very difficult.
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It's abnormal to be able to deliver lines that somebody else has written.
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And that you don't believe often.
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Yeah, exactly.
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You don't fully believe.
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You don't fully understand.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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No, it's very odd.
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And I, let's trust Prati Patel, who were my first two bosses were kind of masters at this.
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And I remember sort of watching them on television, really repeating.
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I think in those days it was the long-term economic plan is working, the long-term economic plan is working.
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But I think although that might work in the short term, it's very damaging in the long term.
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One of the reasons why the public don't trust politicians, why almost half the public says they now don't want to watch the news is because of this.
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We're much more comfortable talking about mental health these days.
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Thank goodness.
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Some very prominent people have smashed taboos and there's been some great campaigns about this.
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I read something you said in your podcast actually about MPs, breakdowns and suicide attempts because you said the politics is deeply unpleasant.
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Did you watch some colleagues sort of crumble?
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Oh, terrible.
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I mean, genuinely terrible.
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I mean, I don't want to talk about the specifics because this is deeply personal to people.
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But yes, colleagues tried to kill themselves, people I knew, in very serious ways.
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I mean, almost killed themselves.
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It was a miracle they weren't dead.
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There were other colleagues who had total breakdowns in the most humiliating, personal, embarrassing fashion possible in public.
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I mean, it was, and I think this is
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because the gap between the way that MPs are encouraged to present themselves to the public and who they really are
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is almost unsustainable for most people.
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It's mad because you're pretending to be this all-knowing, perfect, dynamic, confident, I've got the answers to everything, I know where we're going.
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The truth is, this is a country of 70 million people.
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Politicians don't really know what's going on.
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The idea that anybody actually understands what's going on in every hospital in this country is mad.
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And yet we pretend to the public, don't worry, I've got it fixed.
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I'm sorting out the x-rays in the Carlisle Infirmary.
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You're not sorting out the x-rays in the Carlisle Infirmary, are you?
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Final question, by the way, I could chat to you for a lot longer.
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I'm intrigued because a few years ago you admitted smoking opium at a wedding in Iran.
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What's opium like?
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Well, it didn't have much impact on me.
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So in this particular village, it's a polite thing.
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You're invited to the wedding and they pass it all the way around.
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So this thing got to me and I thought, I'm going to be polite.
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And I then set off up the hill
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and I thought I'm going to have this sort of strange out of body experience.
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But in fact, I had a very, very boring day.
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I was walking for 21 months across Asia, and it was one of the most boring days of my 21-month walk.
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Okay.
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Well, you've done a good job for the war on drugs there.
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Rory Stewart, genuine pleasure, and I'm sure this is going to do really well.
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I really enjoyed it.
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Thank you.
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Thank you very much indeed.
この動画を使って話す練習をする理由
このYouTubeで英語学習の動画は、Rory Stewartの政治に関する洞察を通じて、英語スピーキング練習に最適です。彼の経験や意見は、複雑な政治状況を理解する上で役立つだけでなく、リスニングだけでなく、スピーキング能力を向上させる実践の場となります。特に、彼の感情や意見を表現する能力は、英語学習者が自然な声のトーンや抑揚を真似る際に非常に良い模範になります。shadow speechを使用することで、彼の発音や表現を自分の言葉として習得し、実際の会話でも活用できるようになります。
文法と表現の文脈
この動画では、以下の文法構造や表現が特に重要です：
- 過去形の使用：Rory Stewartが過去の経験を語る際には、過去形を頻繁に使用しています。この構造は、自分の体験を共有する際に役立つでしょう。
- 条件文：彼が「もし私が首相なら」といった発言をすることで、論理的な思考を表現しています。このタイプの文は、状況を仮定するのに非常に役立ちます。
- 疑問文：ディスカッションの中で多くの疑問文が投げかけられ、相手に考えさせる効果があります。これは会話を引き出すのに役立つ技法です。
- 強調表現：意見を述べる際に「私は本当に」といった強調を加えることで、自己主張を強化しています。
一般的な発音のトラップ
この動画には、英語学習者が注意すべき発音のポイントがいくつかあります：
- 政治に関連する専門用語：「Brexit」や「Westminster」は、特定の発音のニュアンスを持つ言葉です。これらを何度も口に出して練習することで、自然な会話につながります。
- 抑揚とリズム：Rory Stewartの話し方には、感情がこもったリズムがあります。このニュアンスを真似ることは、shadowing siteでの練習によっても強化されます。
これらの要素を踏まえ、英語スピーキング練習やshadow speechの実践に役立ててください。この動画を通じて学んだ技術や表現を、自分の日常会話に積極的に取り入れてみましょう。
シャドーイングとは？英語上達に効果的な理由
シャドーイング（Shadowing）は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的：ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影（shadow）」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。