Oratory should blow the doors off the place
I'm writing a book about speaking well in the House of Commons, but why does it matter?
The quotation which forms the title is from Aaron Sorkin, the great celluloid master of rousing oratory and lightning-fire back-and-forth. We’ll all have our favourite scene from Sorkin’s work, from Jeff Daniels’s rousing denunciation of modern America in The Newsroom, through Jack Nicholson’s savage defence of his role in defending the nation in A Few Good Men, to Martin Sheen’s heart-rending paean to simple human bravery and compassion in The West Wing. They are words delivered by talented actors, of course, but still they speak deeply to us, reach into our souls and grasp at the very essence of us.
I could talk about how these, and other, speeches work, the rhetorical and linguistic tools which allow talented word-wranglers to manipulate us—let’s call that manipulation what it is, because there’s nothing shameful or underhand about it—and why they hit their marks so exactly. That’s for another time, and the book. But I do want here to think about why.
British politics rarely sounds like it was scripted by Sorkin. There is something about the American register which sits more easily with grand and swooping sentences, and something perhaps ironic and self-effacing about the way Britons talk which makes that much more difficult on this side of the Atlantic.
That is not to say we Brits cannot move, inspire and bring tears to the eyes. Even this week, at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, the Leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, held the hall rapt as she paid tribute to the late Elizabeth II. Mordaunt is good at this: she has dignity and a graceful timbre which fits solemn occasions, and her words were carefully chosen, expertly assembled and delivered with a power which even moved her, a teetering waver audible in her voice. The speech is worth watching in full; I was there, and you could hear the proverbial pin drop in the conference hall during her pauses.
Of course politics sees fine speeches. These can be set-piece addresses to an audience, like Neil Kinnock’s electrifying demolition of the Militant Tendency at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth in October 1985, with his agonised, angry incredulity—”a Labour council!”—or Margaret Thatcher’s steel-spined, cold, furious defiance at the Brighton conference in 1984 when she opened the day’s proceedings only a few hours after an IRA bomb had ripped through the hotel, coming within a whisker of killing her. These de haut en bas proclamations at their best both form and encapsulate the mood of the moment, showing not only the feelings of the speaker but inviting the audience to feel that way too.
But the heights can be scaled in the very different atmosphere of the House of Commons too, that crowded, steep-tiered, intimate bearpit. Robin Cook, having resigned from the Blair government in March 2003 over the invasion of Iraq, explained his actions in an address which was sad, stoic, tightly argued and unapologetic. He was widely regarded as a master of the Commons, but resonance can come from unexpected quarters: in 2016, with a proposal to bomb IS in Syria before the House, Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, reached deep into himself and found words of persuasion, commitment and simmering fury to explain why he supported military action; while the greatest oratorical Q-ship of all was the resignation speech of Sir Geoffrey Howe in November 1990, when, with mild tones, dry humour but underlying savage intent, he explained not only why he had quit the government after more than 11 years at Mrs Thatcher’s side, but also, thinly disguised, why the Lady was no longer fit to hold the premiership.
These memorable orations need not be limited by solemnity. In January 2019, in a highly pressured confidence debate in the Commons, Michael Gove, then Cabinet Office minister and comfortably the best debater in the current parliamentary Conservative Party, leapt from scorn to glee to withering contempt as he tore apart the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. “Barnstorming” was the adjective applied by many, and certainly Gove’s energy and lightness of touch whispered something of the rural carnival about it, but it was also a demonstration of a man at the top of his game, sure of his argument, in control of his material and revelling in the reaction both of his supporters and the MPs across the floor of the House.
Comedy is sometimes the wholehearted order of the day. Seconding the motion in the Queen’s Speech debate in November 1990, Jeremy Hanley, then a youngish Conservative MP for Richmond and Barnes and regarded as one of the House’s wits, gave an uproarious performance drawing on the dramatic heritage of his showbusiness parents (Jimmy Hanley and Dinah Sheridan) which took in impersonation (of Ian Paisley) and self-deprecation to delight his colleagues.
I make no apology for recalling a number of speeches so far. Repetition and variety are two of the vital ingredients of learning, as the book will argue, and, just as writers should read voraciously, so those who would speak persuasively should take every opportunity to see, hear or read others doing the same. You are never the finished product, you can always learn a new trick, you can always find a new angle.
Oratory matters because it is persuasive. Politicians need to speak well because they need to inspire emotions in people, whether it is enthusiasm for a new policy, the will to vote against a motion of no-confidence or simply derision and hostility towards the other side. Oratory does two related but subtly different things: it can reinforce and buttress feelings that your audience already has, or it can show listeners what they should feel.
Taking in the examples above, Cook was clearly speaking not principally to opponents of the operation in Iraq, who were already on his side: instead he was stretching out to those who were following the Blair government, on all sides of the House, in voting for the invasion. He wanted them to understand that he had not left the government in a fit of pique—though it was universally known that he had been sourly disappointed to leave the Foreign Office after the 2001 general election and move to the senior but less policy-focused post of Leader of the House. He also wanted, with an eye to the future, to make it overwhelmingly clear that this was a single, and agonised, issue of principle, and that he was not becoming a disconsolate thorn in the flesh of New Labour. We know now that he would be dead within little more than two years, suffering a heart attack while hill walking, but there was no reason at the time for him to think that he would never hold office again.
Gove’s speech was different. As the minister winding up the government’s case in a debate on a vote of no confidence, he had to shore up the support of his own troops. He was not seeking to persuade or explain, particularly, but to show Conservative MPs what they already knew, that Jeremy Corbyn was an unthinkable and impossible alternative to Theresa May. They needed to be amused and reassured, shown that their leadership was vigorous and in control—at a time when May’s authority was crumbling as she fought vainly to find a Brexit deal which would find widespread support—and that any doubts they might have had were deeply second-order concerns. Packed into the House that day, they saw Gove, in whom debating had been bred first at school and then at the Oxford Union, seeming taller than ever, dominating the front bench, leaning over the despatch box to taunt the opposition. The result was never in doubt.
Gove is one of the few current MPs who has near-professional form in debating. As well as his fame in the Oxford Union’s chamber, he drank deep from the well of competitive debating, which is a boiled-down and sometimes mechanical form of argumentation in which speakers must fulfil certain criteria for judges, like definition (specifying what the motion is going to mean for the purposes of the debate), rebuttal (marshalling and presenting coherent arguments to disprove or nullify what the other side is saying) and extension (showing how the initial definition can be opened into a wider argument). I did a little bit of competitive debating at university but was not strikingly good at it; I always say that I never brought myself to care enough, but that really translates into never trying hard enough. I found it often sterile, humourless and performative, and I much preferred the freedom (and opportunity for jokes) that our public debates in St Andrews allowed. A judge at a competition in Edinburgh once said after I had spoken “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Eliot Wilson, the living definition of the word ‘laconic’.”
That is not to rubbish competitive debating. To be really good at it, as Gove was—he was chief adjudicator at the 1993 World Debating Championship in Oxford, won by Harvard University—requires a number of important skills. You must be ruthlessly organised and disciplined, setting out arguments clearly and persuasively, you need to be able to call on facts and figures at a moment’s notice to support an argument of which you will have had minimal notice, you have to anticipate what your opponents are going to say or might say, and, for connoisseurs, you need the ability to fight an argument on an intellectual ground of your choosing, so that you are comfortable but the other competitors may be hesitant and scrabbling for grip.
I would say from experience that competitive debating breeds in all but the absolute best performers a quick-fire, relentless, staccato delivery. You are against the clock, speeches being typically between five and seven minutes, and you are desperate to force into your remarks every argument, every statistic, every reference that you have so cunningly formed, so there is little room for elaboration, for verbal curlicues and witty analogies. (Friends will see an obvious reason for my lack of success.) But those who succeed must be intellectually supple to an enormous degree. Dara Ó Briain won the Irish student competition, the Mace, in 1994-95 and his comedy shows that delicate footwork; Professor Anthony Clare, the eminent psychiatrist and broadcaster, won the UK and Ireland-wide John Smith Memorial Mace in 1964; and the novelist Sally Rooney was European debating champion in 2013 (there is a poor-quality video recording of the final for the determined: Rooney speaks at a hundred miles an hour but is dominant and implacable).
There are a lot of concepts I will unpick in the book: how to construct a persuasive speech, how to curry favour with your colleagues, how to read the mood of the House, how to work within the specific constraints of the Commons’s procedures. But here I want to finish on one point that isn’t often talked about. If you become successful to even a small degree at debating, it is enormously satisfying. Everyone suffers from nerves, of course: Harold Macmillan used to vomit with anxiety before Prime Minister’s Questions in the early 1960s, while his colleague (and harsh critic) Enoch Powell advised that you should never feel comfortable while speaking, and so advocated doing so with a full bladder. People manage anxiety in different ways and there are no surefire cures or ways to avoid it, but once it is under control and you are into the flow of your argument, it can be a heady and aggrandising feeling which is near-narcotic.
No-one always speaks well, nor do they always win an argument. But—and I lean here purely on my own experience—there can come a point when you realise that the debate is unfolding as you had hoped, perhaps better than that, your arguments are not just landing but arranging themselves coherently at their target and people are listening appreciatively. Success can be self-reinforcing: you may relax and become more fluent, and the audience often warms to someone who seems to be doing well. It is an important experience to enjoy. If I can read across from my university days to the House of Commons, there are few sensations to match the satisfaction, excitement and sheer joy of sitting down knowing you have performed well, hit your marks and held the attention of your listeners.
I said earlier that I was not very distinguished at competitive debating. There was one round, however, at an Edinburgh tournament (the same one mentioned above with the judge’s dubious compliment), when I and my partner simply had the rub of the green. I forget the motion, but it was an international relations-related subject, possibly dealing with nuclear weapons. I was paired with an American student, Miranda Weigler from Oregon; we had very different world views, and she was much more committed to competitive debating than me. And our styles were as polar as opposites can be: relatively short and very rapid of speech, Miranda poured out arguments as if every moment was her last, while I, tall, quiet and rather parenthetic of disputation, circled a point several times before leaving it for the next.
For whatever reason, that was our day of days. We knew the factual basis for the subject, we had plenty of foundation and back-up, we could cover the spread of argumentation and the two roles we were performing, and, that once, if never again, our chalk’n’cheese presentation suited the circumstances. We were both at our most fluent, though I doubt if I used half as many words as Miranda, or half as many facts. But my discursive scepticism hit home, unsettled the opposition and backed her up to perfection. We won the round by a country mile. It was unfortunate that we were by then so far from the top of the table that greater success was impossible. But what a feeling, to sit down, pleased with the words I’d spoken, patting Miranda reassuringly on the shoulder and knowing we could scarcely have done it better. If you could bottle that, it would be a Class A.
That is a very superficial jog round the track of oratory and debating. Some of it may be useful or instructive to readers, but more of it simply sets out some signposts for the book (did I mention I’m writing a book?). But I hope it lifts the lid on how and why we argue, and how it can be done well. More, as Dead Ringers’ Kirsty Wark is fond of saying, on that story later.