John Whittingdale reviews 'Making Speeches: The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher'
Blackpool, October 1990: Margaret Thatcher gives her last speech as prime minister at a Conservative Party Conference | Image by: RichardBaker / Alamy Stock Photo
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Tom Hurst has written an entertaining and novel assessment of Margaret Thatcher’s speechmaking
This academic yet accessible account of Margaret Thatcher’s speechmaking offers up an entertaining and novel assessment of her time as leader of the opposition, and as prime minister.
Bruges, 1988: Margaret Thatcher addresses the College of Europe | Image by: Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo
There already exist more than 30 biographies of Mrs Thatcher, and countless accounts of her career, so it is difficult to find anything new to write about the ‘Iron Lady’. Tom Hurst has managed to do just this, however, with his thorough analysis of Mrs Thatcher’s speechmaking. Her speeches are traced from their initial scripting, through their deployment to an immediate audience, their dissemination to a national audience, and finally to the way they came, in Mrs Thatcher’s words, to “advance the argument”.
As her political secretary, preparing her political speeches was a large part of my job. It was a different age, when big set-piece speeches provided the best method for her to set out her government’s direction and policies, and she took them very seriously – so much so that each one took many hours of preparation.
Through rigorous archival research, ingenious use of text-reading software and, most importantly, by consulting those who were involved in the production of Mrs Thatcher’s speeches, including myself, Hurst’s book accurately captures this speechwriting process.
Preparing her political speeches was a large part of my job
But it is Hurst’s assessment of how Mrs Thatcher used her political rhetoric that will prove most interesting for any reader interested in post-war politics, regardless of their political leanings. Her abandonment, in early 1979, of moderation on the issue of union power broke the paralysis in policy formation that had hitherto gripped the party.
One of Mrs Thatcher’s senior cabinet members Francis Pym realised that her declaration that she was “not for turning” in 1980 “cut off so many possibilities”. This was precisely her intention. The political implications of the 1988 Bruges speech, part of a wider rhetorical campaign that saw Mrs Thatcher oppose the creation of a ‘United States of Europe’, came to outlive Mrs Thatcher’s time in office. In the words of one of her former secretaries of state, Jim Prior, Thatcher used her public rhetoric to get “her way”.
Here lies the central argument of the book: that what is said to be the golden era of speechmaking from the 1880s to 1940s in fact continued into the 1970s and 1980s. For me, Making Speeches is important because it reminds the reader of a political era when speeches were designed to win, in Mrs Thatcher’s words, the “battle of ideas”. With the arrival of 24-hour news and of social media, today’s political landscape looks radically different to the one in which Mrs Thatcher operated. Nevertheless, this book should remind us that great political speeches should aspire to do more than simply provide tomorrow’s headlines. They should, like Thatcher’s, aim to “advance the argument”.
John Whittingdale is Conservative MP for Maldon
Making Speeches: The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher, 1975-1990
By: Tom Hurst
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
