For as long as there has been writing, the accusation has been levelled that more will mean worse. Ever since William Caxton lamented in 1490 that, no sooner had he invented the printing press than “our language now used varyeth ferre from that whiche was used and spoken when I was borne”, the alarm has been sounded about decline. And, indeed, we have a prime minister who talks about putting things in “buckets” when he means getting his priorities right. His predecessor Liz Truss talked about growing the pie so that everyone gets a bigger slice. The former health secretary Matt Hancock went full business power-talker when he described harnessing “the mission-driven capability of Team Health and Care”. Keir Starmer was no better in his recent piece in the New Statesman. Clichés clashed with mixed metaphors in pursuit of galvanised government: “the missions need to be real and rooted in people’s lives—in each case a North Star to keep our eyes on the prize”.
Political language, like politics itself, is at a low ebb. But the reason why is more complex than it might at first seem. It is tempting, and in fact common, to allege that today’s politicians are worse than they once were. Yet British politics still recruits from the same cadres it always did. Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins were career politicians just as much as Wes Streeting and Rachel Reeves. They seemed broader not because of the books that were in front of them but because they had war service at their back. David Cameron and George Osborne were clever boys from public schools who went to Oxbridge. So were Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler. Has the political elite become somehow systematically more stupid? No, there is something else going on.
First, democracy has a demotic effect on language. The great orotund speeches of David Lloyd George—which would be closer to Churchill in the pantheon had the wireless been available to make them famous—looked back to a parliamentary tradition of which the greatest voice was the free trade and suffrage orator John Bright. Lloyd George famously said: “There is no man in this room who has always regarded the prospects of engaging in a great war with greater reluctance, with greater repugnance, than I have done throughout the whole of my political life,” and yet took Britain through the war all the same.
But the great speakers of that era—and this is true, only more so, of Pitt, Wilberforce and Chatham before them—were speaking to a narrow, more evenly educated audience in a time before universal suffrage. As soon as the democratic politician has to speak to a whole nation, we see a narrowing of the range of reference and a restriction of the vocabulary.
But the most powerful reason is the nature of power. We can see this effect at work by attending to a great political speech of the past. On 3rdApril 1872, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, Benjamin Disraeli defined the condition of England question. He spoke for three and a quarter hours during which he got through two bottles of brandy. After some standard claims to British superiority over other nations, Disraeli got down to the task at hand. The issue that prevented the country being one nation was public health: “pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations”. The extent to which this speech is a prospectus for the government that Disraeli was to lead between 1874 and 1880 is remarkable. The 1875 Public Health Act laid down minimum standards for drainage, sewage and refuse. The Artisans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act of the same year gave local authorities the power to buy, clear and develop the slums. It was all there in the speech.
This speech has lasted not because of Disraeli’s eloquence—though, as a novelist he was better in that regard than most. It has lasted because Disraeli went on to become prime minister in an age in which the premier had executive authority over questions of public health. The answer lay, in 1874, in large infrastructure projects such as the construction of the sewers or state-sponsored slum clearances. So when we are tempted to lament that no politician has yet made the definitively magnificent speech on climate change, this is probably why. The gap between words and deeds has opened up because the problem is too extensive, too scattered, too obviously demanding the consent of too many other people.
The drama has gone from politics and power has fled. But only, sadly, up to a point. The unfashionable notion that we should be grateful for boring politics, even if vivid speech is a casualty, is illustrated every time we turn our attention back to the one site in Europe which is currently producing words of lasting moment. President Zelensky of Ukraine, these past three years, has travelled the world by video link as a writer and speaker who manipulates rhetorical conventions with ease.
One of Zelensky’s rhetorical tricks is to flatter his hosts. He cited Winston Churchill to the UK Parliament, the Declaration of Independence to the US Congress and the Berlin Wall to the Bundestag. As a former television producer, he knows how to use imagery. On Ukrainian Independence Day he referred to “the most terrible steel” which was not within missiles or aircraft “but in shackles”.
That last image is a clue to why Zelensky’s rhetoric is so effective. It is because there is so much at stake. “One day”, he told the UN General Assembly in September 2019, “I would like this speech to be known as the 15 minutes that changed the world”. There are not many occasions on which you can risk a phrase as grand as that, but a war is one of them. It’s why war furnishes so many of the great speeches that are preserved in the anthologies.
The best war speeches are given to elevate the purpose of the war, to dignify it with a purpose. Lloyd George did this in the Great War and Churchill famously did the same in the second World War. For Zelensky, it is important that the battle in Ukraine be seen as a fight for a moral idea, an idea of a united and free Europe, rather than a mere dispute about territory. As he said to the Ukrainian parliament in May 2019, “Europe is here in the mind.”
The grandeur, though, comes from the circumstances and, short of declaring war on the European Union, there is nothing that British politicians can do to create the necessary conditions. That is not to say there is nothing they can do, though. They can copy Zelensky’s clarity, his use of imagery, his dramatisation. And most of all they can emulate his style and his simplicity. Like Barack Obama before him, Zelensky understands that complex ideas are best conveyed by the skilful arrangement of simple words, rather than the display of technical vocabulary.
That would obviate the main problem of modern political rhetoric: it seeks to borrow authority from the language of business. The search for the real culprit for bad language lands us in the murky world of business-speak. In The Merchant’s Tale Chaucer refers to the inarticulate twittering of birds. He calls it jargon. Needlessly complex language is a counterfeit signal of expertise and jargon is the pretense to a body of knowledge that does not really exist. It is language that is designed to exclude the uninitiated; it is abstract and imprecise and marked by the repetition of dull abstractions such as authentic or content. It is language that never earns its vaulting ambition. Avery Dennison promised “to help make every brand more inspiring, and the world more intelligent”—quite the ambition for a company that makes stick-on labels. WeWork are even more pompous, stating as its aim the desire to “elevate the world’s consciousness” .
This nonsense has been a long time in coming. It began with Frederick Winslow Taylor, the original guru of management consultancy. Taylor’s 1911 book The Principles of Scientific Management defined a process by which work was tracked and charted against the clock. The scientific basis of Taylor’s calculations was dubious, to say the least, but his governing idea stuck: management is a skill which has the properties of a science. When Harvard Business School opened Taylor delivered a series of lectures on the new MBA programme. He had 80 students in the first cohort; by 1930 there were over a thousand. This establishing of business as a field of study was accompanied by the emergence of the term “Economics”. Until then, scholars with an interest in commercial activity had studied a broader subject, derived from moral philosophy, called Political Economy. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for example, is a founding text of economics but a book that is rich in philosophical and historical inquiry. Propelled by William Jevons’s A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy (1862) and Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics (1890) the new discipline emerged and mathematics became, as Paul Samuelson put it, “the natural language of economics”.
These developments produced a corporate realm in which language took flight from ordinary usage. The cost to this is significant. Where the language of business abandons ordinary discourse, crimes and misdemeanours are easier. Jargon can make wrongdoing sound innocuous. In 2008 the complex mathematics of highly geared financial packages exceeded the capacity both of regulators to set appropriate guidelines and of most practitioners to understand the risks. If the language of sub-prime had not been so clogged with technical jargon, the world might have been alerted to the fact that a disaster was about to unfold. Being clear would have made disaster less easy to stumble into.
There is no political equivalent to this disaster, but clarity of communication is the currency of the trade. A healthy democracy needs a dialogue between leaders and led in which both are understood. The best politician of the recent Conservative hegemony was Boris Johnson who, for all the irritating curlicues of his style, had a real character as a speaker. David Cameron projected assurance and Theresa May had her moments, notably when she told the Conservatives that they had become the nasty party, when clarity overcome her natural diffidence. Rishi Sunak is the business-speak prime minister, the maestro of the jargon of a Stanford MBA. The tip-off is his excessive use of the word “innovation”, a term that has cancelled itself by ceasing to be innovative. We even now have a government department with Innovation in its title. Sunak loves the talk about innovation as if to say that something is new is the same as saying it is good. That is by definition of the opposite of a conservative. Nobody, either in business or in politics, ever says “we innovated and it was rubbish”—though they ought to, because it happens all the time.
Politics is harder now and, for that reason, political speeches are harder to write. The grand causes have broken into smaller issues. Executive authority is an illusion and the audience senses any large claims to be fraudulent. Yet, for all that, it is still possible to be clear, which has to be the objective. There is a lot that cannot be borrowed from President Zelensky and a lot that we would not want to. But we can learn from his clarity, moral as well as linguistic. We can learn from his confrontation with the truth and the plain eloquence with which he talks his nation into being.
