As a shepherd of speechwriters, my British and European counterpart is Brian Jenner. I'm leafing through a little book he produced, Trade Secrets: Jokes, stories and quotations for desperate speechwriters in 2014.
This one, from Robert Hardman's newish book, Our Queen, got me:
"The Queen's speechwriter was drafting a speech about a visit to Birmingham and the first line read, 'I am very glad to be back in Birmingham.' The Qeen read the sentence, picked up a pen and crossed out the 'very.'"
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