ABSTRACT
Politicians create ‘riffs’ to communicate their ideas, perhaps seven or eight at any one time, according to Chris Bryant, a British Labour Member of Parliament. Riffs are a good way to think about not just the continuities and breaks in ideology, but also the performance as well as the meaning of acts of communication. Riffs will be used on various occasions, whether in the chamber, in a media interview or in the constituency, so the style and tempo need to change completely in the different sites because different relationships are being formed or renewed. Riffs are part of the content of politics that has to be adapted to different relationships. This chapter is about the riffs – what they consist of, how they are created and contested, what impact they have in different contexts – and which aspects of them are idiosyncratic to politicians as a group as opposed to generalisable to all humans.
