Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940
Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987
Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588
Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787
Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947
Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964
Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991
William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789
Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908
Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936
Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963
Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?, Welsh Labour Party conference, Llandudno, 15 May 1987
Maximilien Robespierre: The Political Philosophy of Terror, The National Convention, Paris, 5 February 1794
Adolf Hitler: My Patience Is Now at an End, Berlin Sportpalast, 26 September 1938
Fidel Castro: History Will Absolve Me, Santiago, Cuba, 16 October 1953
Václav Havel: A Contaminated Moral Environment, Prague, Czechoslovakia, 1 January 1990
Elie Wiesel: The Perils of Indifference, The White House, Washington DC, 12 April 1999
Edmund Burke: He is not Member of Bristol, but he is a Member of Parliament, Guildhall, Bristol, 3 November 1774
PROLOGUE
The Birth of Rhetoric
The beautiful ideas of rhetoric and democracy were born in the same moment, in the winter of 431 BC in Athens, when the statesman Pericles stood to deliver his Funeral Oration. It might seem grimly appropriate, as democracy struggles through yet another of its crises, that its birth should have been marked by a funeral oration. There are plenty of predictions that another doleful eulogy will be required soon. Democracy is going through a troubled time and rhetoric is in the dock beside it. The chapters that follow have been written in the conviction that no funeral oration is needed for either.
In his speech, Pericles commemorated the sons of Athens lost in the Peloponnesian War, but he also applauded the glory of the city and made a sparkling case for government with the consent of the people. The currency of persuasion in a democracy, he argued, is not force or authority. It is speech. The moment that fiat is replaced by consent is the moment that oratory begins to count. Rhetoric and democracy are twinned; their histories run together. In this book I shall tell these parallel stories and mount a vigorous defence of the practice of politics in a time when cynicism has become the norm.
The politics of ancient Athens and Rome are distant and unfamiliar to us today except for a single unchanged element. The spectacle of a single person walking to a podium to persuade an audience remains now exactly as it was then. Very few disciplines survive twenty centuries. Nothing of the science of the period is of much more than curiosity value. The drama is still performed, but most of its stylistic conventions are anachronisms. Disciplines tend to date, positions are superseded, ideas fall into disuse, new frontiers are discovered. None of that is true of rhetoric. Reputations in the ancient republics were won and burnished by theatrical performance, and in politics today, they still are. Whether they know it or not, public speakers of all the succeeding ages owe a debt to Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric and Cicero’s De oratore.
Cicero gives us a portrait of the ideal orator. There was no separation, for him, between rhetoric and politics, so the orator needed to be steeped in political wisdom, to display a command of language and psychological insight into the audience, to be witty, shrewd and funny. In an age in which speeches were delivered by heart, the orator needed perfect recall. They also needed a resonant voice, although not all of them have had it. Demosthenes practised with pebbles in his mouth with the aim of improving his timbre. Abraham Lincoln was barely audible at Gettysburg, Winston Churchill sought medical help over his lisp, and John F. Kennedy’s voice was often said to be too reedy for his grand words.
The central point of De oratore, what Cicero calls the Topic, should be engraved over the desk of every speechwriter: make sure you know your central point. This is advice that has worked for all speakers, in every nation and every time, and will always work. The central point of this book is that liberal democracies are the best imaginable places to live and that this claim needs to be compressed poetically into a clear message of hope. As I write, democracy is once again coming under threat from populists, and rhetoric is, like nostalgia, one of those things that are always said not to be as good as they used to be. The threat to democracy is linked to the attack on rhetoric. If we want to attend to the good health of our democracy, and we really must, then we need to attend to the integrity of the way we speak about politics.
The Sophisticated Speechwriter
For many years it was my job to write the words that carry public arguments. As the chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Tony Blair I tried to draft words that did justice to the hopes and passions of politics while at the same time respecting the limitations involved. It was a fascinating and privileged vantage point on the politics of Britain and its chief allies. If Blair’s speeches feature prominently in the chapters that follow it is because of that personal insight rather than necessarily a claim that the words bear comparison with the finest rhetoric in history.
During my time as Blair’s speechwriter I regularly fielded the accusation that rhetoric had declined and that the duplicity of crafted words was contributing to the low repute of politics. These are dangerous illusions that need to be countered. Rhetoric is not crafted deception and it is not worse than it was. There is a serious prospect that, in our time, we are losing faith in politics. The words of politicians float by, practised and polished, but profligate. The respect, veneration and hope first expressed by Pericles, has gone missing. It is the grand purpose of this book to help to call it back.
The accusation that rhetoric is simply duplicity has a long pedigree, and speechwriters have always come in for opprobrium as purveyors of fine falsehoods. In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, Greece was making the transition from aristocracy to democracy. Social class was no longer enough to support a political career, as every free male citizen enjoyed the right to speak in the assembly. This created a novel demand for tuition in the art of rhetoric. A band of itinerant writers and teachers of oratory met that demand, for high fees. They were known as the Sophists and they came in straight away for vilification. Taking money for instruction was thought to be ignoble and the Sophists were immigrants who imported new and unwelcome ideas, such as the notion that truth was not transcendent but emerged from the clash of arguments.
In 423 BC, in The Clouds, Aristophanes was the first to note that rhetorical genius can be turned to ill effect or can conceal dubious motives: It’s just rhetoric, we say. Aristophanes satirises Socrates’ rhetorical fluency and his ability, in the boast of the Sophist Protagoras, to ‘make the weaker case appear the stronger’. In The Clouds Aristophanes has Socrates teach a boy how to argue that a son should beat his parents. They take revenge by burning down Socrates’ ‘Thinking Shop’. Plato, who lived in Athens in the generation following the arrival of the Sophists, shared Aristophanes’ distrust and wrote the classic statement of suspicion about rhetoric. In his dialogue Gorgias, he condemned rhetoric as a ‘knack of flattering