[Mb-civic] Rhetorical skills still count in the U.K.

[Alexander Harper]

The recent front runner for leadership of the UK Conservative Party (Dai Davis) appears to have stymied his chances due to poor rhetorical skills at the party conference. I find it heartening that politicians still need to be able to deliver a make or break speech to win over the doubtful every now and again. Mostly what they say is so carefully choreagraphed and edited in advance, with heckling considered an act of terrorism, that they come over no better nor worse than a TV commercial. Do 'old fashioned' speaking skills have still any relevance in the US - clearly not much if George W. is anything to go by... Is there any politician, of whatever hue, there who can fire an audience in a meeting room or is this now only the domain of revivalist preachers? Seriously, forgive my ignorance, I am interested - any opinions?
Al B



The art of rhetoric in British politics
By John Lloyd 
Published: October 7 2005 20:02 | Last updated: October 7 2005 20:02

The woe of David Davis, translated from front runner to lame duck in the few minutes it took to make a merely adequate speech to the Conservative party conference, illuminates a heartening fact in British political life. Making a speech is still the central part of the tradition. So central, it is unremarkable: no one found it strange that this remains the test. 
 
No other country – even an anglophone one – has retained rhetoric in such a dominant position. In none other has parliamentary politics privileged those who master the art of the speech; since parliament became the dominant political force, a galaxy of stars – Edmund Burke, William (the younger) Pitt, Charles Fox, Robert Peel, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone – made their reputations and broke others’ by voice and presence.

That lasted into the 20th century. Winston Churchill is the obvious example. He was a natural, but also prepared scrupulously: the story is told of an aide who found him murmuring to himself one morning: “I had not intended to intervene in this debate this evening . . . ” But he gained lustre by comparison: the other leading European leaders of his most famous period – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – ranted for hours, without fear of interruption. Even his main democratic partner in the war years gave him no competition: Franklin Roosevelt’s cadences were best known through radio. A US president is rarely called on to debate – as their rhetorical styles show.

Churchill’s contemporaries and immediate juniors of all parties were often his match, or sought to follow his example. David Lloyd George, the Liberal prime minister, brought Welsh chapel-inspired oratory; Ramsay MacDonald was famed for giving the working class a similarly hypnotic representation before he became notorious (on the left) for betrayal. The reputation of Aneurin Bevan, former miner, Labour MP and minister, was made in the Commons: often controversially, in angry opposition to Churchill. So were those of his disciples, Harold Wilson and Michael Foot, and the latter’s disciple, Neil Kinnock – the first prime minister in the 1960s and 1970s, the latter two Labour leaders in the 1980s.

The Tory patrician strain of rhetoric was continued after Churchill by the prime ministers Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan; no other Tory leader since them has been outstanding – Edward Heath was, until his long retirement on the backbenches where he discovered wit, famously wooden; Margaret Thatcher was adequate; and John Major no more than that. Yet their “adequate” would have been, in any other forum, high quality: they faced and at times faced down some of the best parliamentary debaters – Mr Kinnock, John Smith, his successor as leader, Robin Cook, who was to be foreign secretary, Gordon Brown, now chancellor, and Tony Blair, prime minister. Mr Blair and Mr Brown carry forward the tradition. Both fashion at least part of their set piece speeches themselves; both have developed rhetorical styles of great power. The prime minister is sometimes over-sugary, the chancellor too didactic. They can irritate as well as inspire. But for both, the speech remains the thing.

It is embedded in the national fabric. In the 19th century, public discourse spread from the elite to the masses. It was cultivated in public schools and old universities transfixed by the Roman model – at Edinburgh University in the late 1960s, I took a course still called rhetoric, a mix of literature and philosophy. Rhetoric was also the form of extra-parliamentary opposition: Sir Robert Peel’s efforts to free up trade were complemented by anti-Corn Law agitation led by Richard Cobden and John Bright – who were in turn opposed by these proto-socialists, the Chartists, who trained speakers and debaters to champion their cause. The labour movement privileged speaking as much as the Oxford Union: figures as diverse as Ernest Bevin, transport workers’ leader and later foreign secretary, in the first half of the 20th century and mineworkers’ leader Arthur Scargill in the second were men whose first weapons were words.

The four Tory contenders whose speeches impressed this week reflected the rhetorical tradition: David Cameron had public school and Oxford in his knapsack; Ken Clarke, Cambridge; Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Liam Fox, the Tory associations in Edinburgh and Glasgow universities respectively. The one who fell back because of his speech, David Davis, also had, in the end, an elite education – but at Harvard Business School, where rhetoric is not taught. 

The conventional wisdom now is that television and the soundbite have displaced debate and the speech: it is at best partially true. As Sir Malcolm remarked after Mr Davis’s speech: “He will have to take on Gordon Brown in the Commons, and that’s the test.” British political leaders must work in two registers – high rhetoric and brief slogans: the first still affects, intimately, their career and standing.

Political power in Britain does not, or not only, reside in party, institutions or wealth. It depends on men and women mustering the fire, force and phrases with which to move, impress and win – against the opposition and, above all, against those closest to them.
 
 


-- 
___________________________________________________________
Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com
http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm