I am writing this from a crammed Edinburgh Festival where the appetite for live shows is close to insatiable. Everywhere there are insane queues for the latest performances. Evidently people ache to be away from their phones and social media for a bit and gather to watch a performance or a performer. There are limits to being on X alone.
I am one of those who ache. I perform my own show in Edinburgh and elsewhere on the dramas and characters that shape the current wild world of politics. But above all I am a spectator. I watch fascinated as a single person alone on a stage can hold an audience for an hour or more. For the best solo performers there are no props or music. They have words and their voices to mouth them. The audience is bound together by this simple magic.
I watch the best stand-ups throughout the year and only recently have I realised why I do so. They fill a big gap. I used to travel fair distances to watch the great political speakers at live events, often for work but not always. Today, the orators have disappeared. The political stage is silent as their stand-up equivalents flourish.
I would not rush to the end of my road to see many contemporary political speakers. Keir Starmer will never cast a spell over an audience, which is a problem for him and one reason why he is accused of lacking purpose. His cabinet has qualities but a capacity to hold an audience with a speech is not one of them. There are no Michael Heseltines on the Tory benches to excite activists and those that might be vaguely interested in politics. Currently, only Nigel Farage holds big meetings that captivate his audiences but he is not an especially impressive speaker. He stands out because he is better than anyone else at the moment. Jeremy Corbyn might start to pack out halls again with his new party but he is not remotely in the same league as his hero, Tony Benn.
The so-called mainstream parties that once erupted with powerful speakers are bereft of such public advocates. Most are cautiously robotic. A few, like Wes Streeting, are brilliant interviewees but do not make memorable speeches. Others try too hard to excite but, in their transparent effort, become less interesting as speechmakers. Robert Jenrick springs to mind. His speech at last year’s Tory conference was dismal on many levels.
The decline in oratory is relatively recent.
As a student in the early 1980s I was a regular attender, like Corbyn, of Benn’s live events, each of them packed. I never heard Benn make a bad speech. I used to take girlfriends to them for a night out, though the relationships did not last long. But Benn was funny, seeking to make the connections between disparate current events and historical ones. Before long he had moved from Jesus Christ to the Chartists, then the suffragettes, before his prediction that if Labour followed his ideas it would win the next election. The rapturous response was part of the theatre of it all. I was not necessarily converted to Bennism but his rallies made me hugely excited about politics. I saw it could be as thrilling as any rock gig or conventional theatre.
My view was reinforced when, as a student journalist, in 1983 I saw Neil Kinnock speak at a make-or-break by-election in Darlington, a contest Labour had to win for various highly charged reasons. The hall was so crammed, there was a huge overspill. Kinnock’s style was very different from Benn’s and by then he had defined himself against “Bennism”. He was speaking as a loyalist whereas Benn had the advantage of being the romantic rebel taking on the leadership. This did not stop Kinnock from holding the voters in thrall, his style that of a funny, passionate revivalist preacher. The crowds left resolved to vote for Kinnock’s party in that crucial by-election. This was before he became leader. Kinnock did not win a general election but some of his speeches as leader will be cited forever, while tedious addresses by those moving carefully up the ministerial ladder are forgotten as they are being delivered.
There was a similar charge of electricity when Michael Heseltine spoke at Conservative conferences. He still possesses the magic. A couple of months ago I interviewed him at the Cambridge Book Festival. They cheered when he walked in and when he left, captivated throughout. There were others to the right of Heseltine who could light up the stage, most famously Enoch Powell, though I never saw him live. The recordings show how he did it: the mannered intensity, a sense of heightened anticipation as he developed his provocative arguments.
The speedy decline in oratory and huge public events began in the 1990s. There was a growing recognition that most voters only saw politicians delivering a soundbite on TV bulletins. That was therefore what mattered, politics compressed to 15 seconds. Tony Blair was a good speaker and an even better interviewee but he was part of the era when live events began to disappear. Only a few voters would attend. The rest would not be swayed by a mesmerising speech, so why bother making one? The current government’s favoured form of communication seems to be allowing Sky’s Beth Rigby to warn Keir Starmer how useless he is in near weekly exchanges between political editor and prime minister. Another favoured vehicle is the daily broadcasting round where an exhausted minister wakes at 5am and prepares for eight interviews in two hours where they are told by self-obsessed interviewers that “all our viewers/listeners” want to know why the government has let them down. This is unlikely to inspire voters to engage in politics, let alone be excited by it.
The deep disillusionment and boredom with democratic politics point to why the loss of great political performers matters. Not many can attend live events, but the sense of political vitality they generate goes well beyond the confines of the physical gathering. Naive broadcast editors agonise about how to attract younger audiences. Stand-ups do so with ease in Edinburgh and elsewhere. Meanwhile others are drawn into politics by the excitement. Years ago I recall Sadiq Khan hosting a gathering at which Kinnock was the guest speaker. The future London mayor said it was hearing a Kinnock speech that made him want to enter politics. He was by no means alone. Tories have said the same of Heseltine. Who would say that about a current politician?
For big political figures the live event has a big advantage. It forces them to frame arguments for a speech. Governments or opposition parties cannot be shapeless if key figures are required to impress audiences by conveying their sense of purpose. This speechless Labour administration would have no choice but to think more attentively about what they are for.
The live event should be only a small part of the political repertoire. Many other outlets matter too. But its disappearance altogether outside the party conference season is a terrible loss. It leads to a drab politics without colour. No wonder voters turn away. All the energy in Edinburgh is available for politics. But that requires big politicians to come to life fearlessly and address voters with the art of the great political teachers of the recent past. Technocratic proclamations are dull. Boredom is dangerous.
Meanwhile in the absence of any great political speeches I plan to see Stewart Lee several times this autumn. He can cast a spell.
Steve Richards presents “Rock N Roll Politics” at the Edinburgh Festival… a different show each day
[See also: Visions of an English civil war]
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