When anger rises, think of the consequences
Politics is a passionate business, but speaking in anger is high-risk: it shows how much you care but can reveal your weaknesses
This essay will be something of a summary of part of the book I’m writing (hello, yes, I’m writing a book on how to speak well in Parliament, I may not have mentioned that) but there are some headline points I want to float at this stage. My thesis here is that politics often makes people angry—we live in an age of bitter hostility and sharp disagreement—and it is quite right that our politicians should be passionate; but speaking angrily, while it can sometimes be powerful and resonate with your audience, can also reveal your weaknesses and demonstrate a lack of nuance.
Although the book deals with speaking in the Chamber of the House of Commons, here I’ll range a little more widely, taking in set-piece and platform speeches too, such as party conferences, public meetings and television performances. I will always insist that you should always be learning, and, just as writers need to read voraciously, so orators need to soak themselves in speechifying of all kinds, and there are always lessons to be learned.
Those who take up politics professionally take it, by definition, extremely seriously. There are obsessives, of course, like the young William Hague who had Hansard delivered to his parents’ Yorkshire home and addressed the Conservative Party conference in 1977 at the age of 16; Gordon Brown, who, particularly before his 2000 marriage to Sarah Macaulay, seemed to find relief from weighty issues of public policy only in the sometimes-gruelling support of Raith Rovers FC; or, perhaps most striking of all, Margaret Thatcher, who had a fearsome appetite for work and mastered every subject she approached, but had so little beyond her politics that after her departure from office she would become exercised about an issue she saw on television before remembering “It’s not me any more.”
The supposed ambition of any leading politician is to develop what Denis Healey’s wife Edna called a “hinterland”, that is, interests away from the job in which they can find emotional and mental solace. Healey had these interests in abundance: music, poetry, photography. John Major famously adored cricket, spending the afternoon after his resignation as prime minister at the Oval. Kenneth Clarke’s love of jazz and birdwatching were almost as famous as his political achievements. Even the frigid, unknowable Edward Heath was a brilliant musician and race-winning yachtsman.
Anger can indicate that you lack a safety valve. After all, if politics is your whole life, then a flare of passion in that can be overwhelming. And this is dangerous, because when we see politicians—or any public figures—losing their tempers, we know they have lost control, they have allowed something to penetrate to their core and cause them genuine distress or concern. This is especially true in British politics, which still carries a trace of the cult of the gentleman-amateur, of someone who can exercise superhuman levels of detachment and ultimate of a sense that real, raw emotion is somehow undignified. The epitome of this was A.J. Balfour, the Edwardian Conservative statesman, who cultivated an image of Olympian relaxation and famously remarked “Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all.”
(I will not deal here with the physical manifestations of anger in politics, though everyone will think of John Prescott, pictured above, who responded to an egg thrown by a protestor during the 2001 general election campaign by turning and punching the man in the face.)
One of the earliest public demonstrations of anger as a political defeat was almost designed to illustrate the point. ABC, very much the third American news network behind NBC and CBS, tried to do something different for the coverage of the 1968 political conventions (the Republicans met in Miami, the Democrats in Chicago) by recruiting well-known adversaries as a double-act to provide commentary, William F. Buckley Jr, the founder of the conservative National Review, and Gore Vidal, the patrician writer and controversialist. The result is captured perfectly in the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies.
The network had no need to manufacture controversy. Buckley and Vidal loathed each other and sparred verbally almost from the beginning. The barbs, eloquent and elegant, flew back and forth, and tempers simmered, though Vidal seemed better able to maintain an amused detachment from the whole process, taking pleasure in goading Buckley. Despite his laid-back, aristocratic manner, Vidal prepared with enormous thoroughness for these encounters, allowing him sometimes to trip up the volatile Buckley.
The fire burst out of control on 28 August 1968. Discussing US policy in Vietnam, to which he was opposed, Vidal accused Buckley of being a “crypto-Nazi”. The latter had served in the US Army and then the CIA, and was indeed an outspoken conservative, but he could not bear Vidal’s final slur.
“Now listen you queer,” he spat, “quit calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddamn face and you'll stay plastered.”
This extraordinary verbal bout was broadcast to the nation and showed the audience that Vidal had more than touched a nerve. The glee on Vidal’s face as Buckley boils over is clear to see even on the grainy black-and-white footage. Although I’m much more in sympathy with Buckley, the heart sinks as he leaps vigorously into Vidal’s trap. The anger, the loss of control, demonstrates to anyone watching who had won the point.
Fury can be counter-productive in the House of Commons. In September 2019, as the government attempted (ultimately unsuccessfully) to prorogue Parliament for an unusually long period, the Attorney-General, Geoffrey Cox, appeared at the despatch box to put a brave and legalistic face on the administration’s position. Cox is a very experienced and successful barrister—in the 10 years before that, he had earned £6 million at the Bar—and approached his task with the advocate’s easy detachment.
Feelings were running high. The opposition felt that the proposed prorogation was intended to deny the Commons the opportunity to scrutinise the ongoing Brexit negotiations, and their dudgeon was not just high but stratospheric. When the veteran Labour MP for Huddersfield, Barry Sheerman, got up to question the Attorney, he was suffused with anger. Sheerman is a mercurial figure and has become more splenetic with age (he was then 79), but as he spoke, jabbing his finger towards the government benches and flushing an ever-deeper shade of crimson, he lost almost all control.
I came into the Chamber today thinking I felt sorry for the Attorney General—I did!—but every word he has uttered today shows no shame, no shame at all. The fact is that this Government cynically manipulated the Prorogation to shut down this House, so that it could not work as a democratic assembly. He knows that that is the truth, and to come here with his barrister’s bluster to obfuscate the truth, and for a man like him, a party like his, and a leader like this Prime Minister to talk about morals and morality is a disgrace.
Sheerman felt strongly, and that was obvious; but his anger gained him no traction. Conservative backbenchers jeered and booed, lining up behind the government, and Cox was utterly unmoved. He rose and batted Sheerman away, turning the argument round to calling for Labour’s support for a general election, which at that point they opposed.
I am not sure I discerned a question in that marshmallow of rhetoric, but in so far as there was a question, there is an answer. If the hon. Gentleman thinks the Government should no longer be governing, he should tell his leader to bring a motion of no confidence this afternoon and to agree to a simple one-line statute that fixes the election by a simple majority. We would be delighted to meet the right hon. Gentleman wherever he chooses in front of the electorate, who will judge whether the machinations he supports and the devices to which he resorts to make sure that this dead Parliament continues are right or wrong.
This is not to say that anger is a wholly ineffective or self-destructive tool. Voters, used to believing that most politicians are insincere and dissembling, sometimes find that a flash of genuine emotion is something to which they can relate. It can sometimes show that a politician has simply reached the end of his endurance for the polite discourse to which they aspire.
During the campaign for the first general election of 1974, outgoing Conservative MP Enoch Powell had not only abandoned his party but had advised the electorate to vote for Harold Wilson’s Labour Party, on the simple grounds that Wilson was offering a referendum on whether the UK should remain a member of the European Economic Community which it had only recently joined, a move Powell had opposed. Many in the Conservative Party felt bitter and betrayed by this, even if Powell had been a semi-detached member of the party since his controversial “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968.
On 26 February, at an anti-Common Market rally at the Victoria Hall in Shipley, Powell was midway through his remarks when there came a clear catcall from the audience: “Judas!” It took him a few moments to process the jibe but then he stopped. Powell was often seen as a dry, academic figure, but it was a misleading impression. His passions burned deep, and once he realised what had been shouted out, he reacted in an agonised voice which electrified the hall. Pointing at the heckler, he hissed “Judas was paid! Judas was paid! I am making a sacrifice!” His white face and tortured voice made his point with impossible eloquence. This was no tactical manoeuvre for him but a decision which he knew could (and indeed did) end any hopes of a front-line political career. It is a hard few seconds to watch.
Unbridled passion can have a powerful effect in the Commons too. In March 2015, the coalition government (or principally its Conservative component) sought to ambush the Speaker, John Bercow, by bringing forward a motion to introduce a secret ballot for the election to his post. It was believed that this would affect the Speaker’s support when he came for re-election, and perhaps allow him to be unseated.
The idea in principle arose from a report by the House’s Procedure Committee, but its chairman, Charles Walker, had not been advised of the government’s plans. Indeed, he told the House that he had attended a social function only a week ago at which he had spoken to the Leader of the House, William Hague, and had been given no indication of their plan. Walker, a friend of Speaker Bercow and a man who wears his emotions endearingly openly, was so angry at this development that he was fighting back tears.
I have been played as a fool. When I go home tonight, I will look in the mirror and see an honourable fool looking back at me. I would much rather be an honourable fool, in this and any other matter, than a clever man.
The outburst mesmerised the House. The opposition not only cheered Walker but stood to applaud him, genuine affected by his painfully sincere, wavering voice, and the government, humiliated, staged an awkward retreat. Speaker Bercow would survive in office for another four years.
Like any oratorical tool, anger can be effective if it is deployed with care. But, wheher on a public platform or on the floor of the House of Commons, it is acutely sensitive to context and atmosphere. While Sheerman seemed out of control and aggressive, Walker showed his vulnerability by displaying raw, livid emotion which made his point as effectively as the words he spoke. Tone and mood can be extremely eloquent, but they are brutal weapons: too much and too often render them decreasingly powerful. So, if you want to allow your real fury to show through, be selective and sparing: people may listen once, perhaps even twice, but they will eventually switch off.