A Manner Of Political Speaking

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32312, 2 June 1970, Page 15

A Manner Of Political Speaking

'By

DAVID WOOD,

political

editor of “The Times”, through N.Z.P.A.)

LONDON, June 1.

The word is the style, the style is the man, and the man is the Government that shall be after June 18.

Mr Heath has questioned Mr Wilson’s style, by which he means he questions Mr Wilson’s word: and Mr Wilson has been reinforced by the Chancellor of the Exchequer in challenging Mr Heath’s honesty, by which they mean his style. Mr Callaghan and Mr Healey have rushed into the witness box to testify that they have known the Prime Minister in good times and bad and that anybody who ever thought ill of him, as they themselves have done on occasion, is a self-seeking scoundrel. Mr lain Macleod has done a like service for Mr Heath, 'although Mr Wilson has

raised a doubt whether the author of the Conservative value-added tax is giving the character evidence from the witness stand or the dock. At this early stage of the General Election campaign, style is all. It is an agreeable and unexpected turn of events that encourages me to consider an aspect of the style of leadership that gets too little attention, although it provides the best test, and in some sense the only general test, for judging the quality of a Prime Minister or an Opposition Leader. I mean the style of the speeches they make to carry their principles, policies, ideas and emotions to the minds, hearts, and (where applicable) consciences of men. Take the speeches that Mr Wilson and Mr Heath made on Friday, when they joined battle for the first time on the post-dissolution hustings. Both speeches, I think it fair to say, suffered from overstoking that produced a head of steam which came near to bursting the boilers of common sense and verisimilitude.

They were speeches made by desperate men who feared that they would not be heard if they did not shriek at the top of their voice.

But that is-not the present point: even raving and rant may ' ave a kind of style, as nonconformist preachers used to prove in every Sunday pulpit. Those Friday speeches were anti-style. I do not mean that they lacked the controlled periods of Gladstone, the verbal power and pomp of Churchill, the weight of manner that Eden could bring to a Foreign Office feather of fact, or the elegance that turned a Macmillan statement into something close to wit. These are styles that have only antiquarian interest in politics. Mr Wilson and Mr Heath were anti-stylist, and will go on being anti-stylist, because they deliver their speeches to one small audi-ence-in the hope of catching the ear and the eye of quite different audiences, for whom another style is thought obligatory. Mr Wilson speaks in Cardiff and Mr Heath in Bexley,

but the audiences they play for are the millions of television viewers and the skimmers of streamer headlines in tomorrow’s newspapers. Analysis of the speeches shows the consequences. On page 3 of Mr Wilson’s Cardiff script there were 16 sentences with an average length of 18 words, although one of the sentences ran to 56 words. On page 3 of Mr Heath’s Bexley script there were 14 sentences with an average length of 13 words.

Nor is it entirely accurate to call them sentences. The contemporary party leader’s speech is much made up of verbless slogans, and the adjectives, if any, are al! sound and fury, like “massive,” signifying nothing in particular. The slogans are machineturned to be fired off staccato into a microphone, after the manner of those amiably mild, self-doubting television reporters who go into a studio to be transformed into aggressive dogmatists. (“Do not qualify,” an adviser once said in a studio. “You are here to speak cap-

tions to pictures ”) Nothing succeeds like excess. So far as this may be reckoned a style of political speech at all, 1 suspect it to be a style that is unfriendly to truth and alien to anything that deserves to be called reason: and in so far as style grows out of the essence of the man, one inseparable from the other, I wish to say that I do not think so ill of Mr Wilson or Mr Heath as to believe that they can practise a spurious style without becoming themselves spurious. On Friday night, there seemed to me to be one consolation. Having first studied with distaste the Cardiff and Bexley texts, 1 watched their delivery in the television news.

They were so false to Mr Wilson and Mr Heath that they both looked like amateur actors reading a play script on sight for the first time, although Mr Heath, for once, was possibly the more plausible actor of the two.

The word is the style, and the style is the man.