Rhetoric for our times

AC Grayling complains of a lack of oratory in British political speech. It's still there, just less obvious
Winston Churchill microphones
Winston Churchill's oratory was admired during the hard times of the second world war, but afterwards some thought him a windbag. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

The philosopher AC Grayling has complained that we live in a "post-rhetorical culture". Speaking at Hay festival this week, he said British politicians talked in soundbites and tweets, and that our last great orator was Winston Churchill, so we had to look to the US to find the tradition surviving, embodied by Barack Obama. It's true UK politicians don't, by and large, give the sort of orotund, poetic, self-delighting speeches that we associate with Churchill's wartime premiership. What Grayling has noticed, though, is not that we live in a post-rhetorical age but that the rhetoric of our age does not behave like that of the past. And to complain about this, I'm afraid, is to blame an umbrella for the weather.

Rhetoric – of which set-piece political oratory is only a small part – is, above all else, about connecting with an audience. It has to adapt to the expectations of that audience and the medium of its transmission. Nobody now gives 40-minute classical orations barnacled with clever chiasmuses, because nobody now listens to them, and the high style – what vulgarly gets called "rhetorical" – is out of fashion.

Actually, it was out of fashion in Churchill's time: for much of his career people thought him a windbag. Those rolling periods and apocalyptic cadences only really hit the sweet spot when western Europe was peering over the brink of the long drop, families were huddled round the wireless looking for uplift and something with a bit of historical resonance was called for.

But Churchill wasn't the last person in the history of these islands to give an inspiring set-piece speech. Look at that nice Tim Collins. George Galloway has a nifty line in invective. And – at the risk of causing Guardian readers to explode – however you regard his politics, Enoch Powell could turn a phrase. But it's telling that these people are more or less marginal.

The reasons Obama can do what David Cameron can't are fairly straightforward. At the risk of perpetuating a national stereotype, Brits don't warm to speakers who sound as if they're playing trumpet voluntaries to themselves. We are, in our political discourse, sceptical and deflating. In a country with a tradition of panto, as the former Blair speechwriter Philip Collins has pointed out, no politician could get away with "Yes, we can". The reply from the other side of the house would be "Oh, no, we can't!"

Americans like the high style more: they have an "American dream"; we have "the British way of life". Also, our political system is a bit more back-and-forth across the dispatch box than thundering from the White House lawn. It's a token of this that, when Tony Blair (an effective orator – it wasn't just the uplifting keyboard stylings of Brian Cox on Things Can Only Get Better that clinched the 1997 election) was at his most high-flown he was attacked, rather than applauded, for being presidential.

American politics not only supports a different register: it involves a different lexicon. Obama and other American politicians have the elevated language of the pulpit available to them. British politicians now don't "do God" – and it's notable that the ones who do, such as Ian Paisley, are generally outside the mainstream.

You may decry soundbites, but they aren't an innovation. JFK had soundbites. Cicero had soundbites. It's true they've tended in recent years to float free of the arguments they arise from – but that's only what you'd expect in a culture where it's not how the speech is delivered, but how it's reported, that determines how it will connect with its intended audience.

Cicero's rhetoric was adapted to the Roman senate. Churchill's rhetoric was adapted to radio. Modern political rhetoric is adapted to headlines, photo captions, rolling news and Twitter. There's more rhetoric around us than ever before. But the less rhetorical it sounds, the less conscious we are of how it goes to work.