“If you were prime minister now, what would you have done about the economy and this crisis that Mr. Harper has not done? This utterly simple question put to Canadian politician Stephane Dion who was in the running for the prime minister’s office in 2008 by the anchor of CTV Steve Murphy made Dion so jittery that he clammed up. Dion made the anchor repeat the question thrice, and yet he could not answer and only fumbled awkwardly.
The embarrassed MP then requested CTV not to air the footage, but the channel decided against it making the Canadians gasp in astonishment. This goof-up by a seasoned politician is regarded as one of the most embarrassing political blunders in Canada.
Dion was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and the Leader of the Opposition in the Canadian House of Commons. Dion resigned as Liberal leader after the party’s defeat in the 2008 general election, but remained in parliament and was re-elected in the 2011 polls.
But, Dion is not an exception. Internationally several politicians have made bloomers in front of the media. Some have been harmless and hilarious, while others have been serious and they had to pay a price.
The then Vice President George Bush committed a faux pas during his presidential campaign. In one of his speeches, he said, “For seven and a half years, I’ve worked alongside President Reagan. We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex … uh … setbacks.”
Indian politicians, too, have had their moments of embarrassments. India’s foreign minister S M Krishna made a blunder in United Nations. He accidentally read from the speech papers of Portuguese foreign minister Luis Amado. Only after three minutes into his reading, it was detected that he was reading a wrong speech.
Hardeep Singh Puri, India’s UN envoy, realised his foreign minister’s mistake and intervened. “You can start again,” he said, and handed him the correct speech. After making a public error in his first speech at the UN, Krishna was nonchalant: ‘There was nothing wrong in it. There were so many papers spread in front of me, so by mistake the wrong speech was taken out.’
One reason the mistake went undetected for some time was that the Portuguese foreign minister had finished speaking and the English translation of his speech, which was being distributed, got mixed up with Krishna’s papers.
Similar blunder was committed by Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen. He was reading the speech in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar. It was. He was repeating the speech US President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter. Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: “That’s your speech.”
A laughing Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.
This brings to my mind a comment made by senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh who had called Osama Bin Laden as “Osamaji”, creating a furore over the “respect” which he was showing to the world’s most hated terrorists put down by the US in an audacious strike inside Pakistan. Singh questioned Pakistan about its ignorance that “Osamaji” was staying near to the military academy.
So, don’t be surprised tomorrow if some politician addresses the underworld don Dawood Ibrahim as “Dawoodji” or Ajmal Kasab as “Ajmalji”.
