Friends Romans Countrymen
We can all quote the great speeches from history, but what of those clangers that the speakers would rather we forgot? David Turner digs out some toe-curling examples
THERE have been great speeches that have moved hearts and changed the course of history. There have been mediocre speeches that have set an audience yawning and wondering when they will end. There have been speeches of toe-curling embarrassment that have left the audience desperately wishing they were somewhere else—or, as the jeweller Gerald Ratner might put it more succinctly, speeches that have been crap.
It is this last category of peroration that has been curiously neglected by Britain’s leading historians.
‘Crap’ is the single word with which Mr Ratner, whose business empire suffered a sudden steep descent in the 1990s, is most associated. The cause of the fall of the house of Ratner was a notorious speech to the Institute of Directors in 1991, in which he airily declared: ‘We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People
say: “How can you sell this for such a low price?” I say: “Because it’s total crap.”’
Shoppers responded to the resulting media furore by boycotting the jewellery chain, which never really recovered, despite the wheeze of renaming it Signet in a bid to make people forget Mr Ratner had anything to do with it.
The most shocking aspect of this speech is not that Mr Ratner was drunk, but rather that he was sober. This was no gaffe made by a tongue loosened into excessive loquacity, but a quip he had planned. Mr Ratner’s wife had urged him to take the joke out of a carefully prepared text, but he ignored her advice. (In a strange postscript to the affair, he later became a successful motivational speaker.)
By contrast, the consumption of a couple too many glasses (or bottles) has been responsible for many of the worst speeches of British history. Take the occasion, in 1983, when Tory MP Alan Clark galloped, in an inebriated and inept manner, through a speech prepared for him by his officials, missing out the odd page or three in
a drunken effort to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. His reputation as a serious politician never recovered and he failed to make it into the Cabinet.
However, this was minor-league drunkenness when compared with the besotted state in which fellow Old Etonian Guy Burgess found himself when he staggered to his feet to give an address in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1951. Burgess’s effort was, strictly speaking, more of a harangue.
Much of the diplomat’s spectacularly undiplomatic speech consisted of antiAmerican invective and pro-communist sympathy. The audience? Possibly the proudest Americans and staunchest anti-communists in the country: officer cadets from the Deep South. To their credit, they responded in an impressive show of old-fashioned Southern courtesy, with polite applause.
On his return to London, Burgess was fired from the Foreign Office for this and other misdemeanours. Shortly after, he fled to Moscow on learning that he was about to be unmasked as a Communist double agent.
The nadir of Burgess’s speech was his decision to go to sleep as the next speaker prepared for his presentation. However, maladroit beginnings can be just as important as clumsy endings. Consider Jim Hacker, the fictional Cabinet Minister of the 1980s who, with all his flaws, seemed all too real to the politicians who loved the TV series and diaries.
Hacker faced an acutely embarrassing moment when he started reading a speech to a conference of industrialists, only to discover several paragraphs in, on expressing his gratitude for their warm welcome, that he was thanking the wrong people— he was reading a speech meant for a different conference on a different day.
More acute embarrassment was still to follow: the right speech, which his principal private secretary, Bernard Woolley, hastily handed him was, unfortunately, identical to the first one, except for the obligatory expression of thanks to his hosts. Opinion varies over how bad the event was. Hacker boasted in his diary that he dealt with it
“Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defiled this sacred place?” was not the worst diatribe
deftly, without too much awkwardness. Questioned by the diaries’ editors after the event, Bernard had a harsher assessment.
Continuing on a political theme, James I’s 1604 dissolution of the English Parliament was astoundingly high-handed. The monarch decided to devote much of the speech to insulting his audience. ‘I will not thank where I feel no thanks due,’ he moaned. Other highlights included ‘You see how many things you did not well’ and ‘I am not of such a stock as to praise fools’. Unsurprisingly, this speech didn’t go down well. On the contrary, it began the steady deterioration in relations between King and Parliament that led to the Civil War 38 years later.
Sir Oliver Cromwell outdid even James in 1653, in his speech dissolving the Long Parliament, which consisted entirely of diatribes (‘Ye sordid prostitutes, have you not defiled this sacred place?’ is only about the fourth worst of them). However, as he had 40 armed musketeers standing behind him, he could say what he liked; it didn’t matter that his remarks went down like a lead balloon.
Another fault is to deliver a speech that would be perfectly good on another occasion, but doesn’t fit the audience on which it’s being inflicted. Take Sir Alfred Munnings, the famed Society painter not so much of the aristocracy, but of that far more important subject matter: their horses. His 1949 discourse would have gone down well at an annual cricket-club dinner. Unfortunately, however, on this occasion, he was speaking as the outgoing president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Emboldened by drink and the presence by his side of Sir Winston Churchill, he laid into modern painters, Picasso and Matisse in particular.
As Sir Alfred put it: ‘If you paint a tree, for God’s sake make it look like a tree!’ He then turned to Churchill, saying: ‘I know he is with me because once he said to me, “Alfred, if you met that Picasso coming down the street, would you join with me in kicking his something something something?” I said: “Yes, sir! Yes! I would!”’ Conspiracy theorists might suggest Churchill feared that Sir Alfred, who sullied his own reputation as a painter for decades, would rival the statesman as a great orator unless nobbled. What, in conclusion, can readers nervous about delivering speeches learn from the mistakes of the past? A few tips, in rough chronological order: listen very carefully to the advice of your spouse, make sure you haven’t mixed up your speeches, don’t drink until the ordeal is over and don’t fall asleep when it’s the next person’s turn. Finally, if all is going wrong, make a joke of it.
When the set behind Theresa May began to fall apart during her disastrous speech to the Conservative party conference last year —the legend ‘Building a country that works for everyone’, started, with a sense of irony impressive for an inanimate object, to disassemble—a well-placed bon mot or even a well-timed chortle could perhaps have retrieved the situation. Boris Johnson might even have turned the mishap to his advantage—but that’s probably the last thing Mrs May wants to hear.