Summary
The historian Simon Schama, talking to me on the phone from Columbia University in New York, recalls the Roman orator Cicero: It was thought by the great classical writers that in the formal set-piece rhetoric you discover not the mischief of the man, not the Machiavellian wiles, but the true, transparent integrity. The effect GeoffreyHowe-now Lord Howe of Aberavon, who in his time delivered one of parliament's more memorable speeches - meets me at the Peers' Entrance to the House of Lords early one morning in December. The lines became so famous that some time afterwards, as he walked round his local shopping centre in Banbury, a man spotted him and asked: "Is he that chap who attacked Margaret Thatcher with a cricket bat?" Looking back, Howe says that the speech was never intended as a direct challenge to Thatcher's leadership, more as away of expressing his doubts over a particular issue - Europe.
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Extract
The Single, Brilliant Idea
Around the oval table at the National Liberal Club, an old gentleman's club in Westminster, sits a group of men and women. In front of them, on a small television, perform an array of politicians. The films skate back through time: Blair, Thatcher, Churchill.
We are here to learn about speeches - how to write them, how to give them. We have been guided through the verbal tricks that make a speech fly: contradictions (Blair: "September 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue"), opposites (Napoleon: "Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is for ever"), phrase reversals (Obama: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America"). We learn about surfing applause, about talking over the roar of adulation in order to fuel it (quite literally, claptrap). We learn how to be funny, how to paint pictures with our words, the secret of the perfect anecdote. On a break mid -morning, our teacher Max Atkinson, a former speechwriter to Paddy Ashdown, goes down to the garden next to the club for a cigarette. His students - professionals from FTSE -100 companies, quangos, communications teams in multinationals - discuss the morning's work over coffee. Atkinson has condensed the art of speec...See the full content of this document
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