Review: Making Speeches. The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher, 1975–1990, by Tom Hurst

Tom Hurst finds in Margaret Thatcher's political career a basis on which to offer a detailed account of speechmaking as a form of political activity that can encourage far-reaching social change. While drawing on an analysis by Anthony King, he tells us that Thatcher (as leader of the opposition and as Prime Minister) saw her speeches as means to the end of ‘declarative leadership’. She sought to use words in ways that would bring about alterations in the outlook and behaviour of her compatriots and others. This led her, on Hurst's account, to practise what the historian Maurice Cowling called ‘high politics’. Politics in this form finds expression in the use of rhetoric in ways attuned to the contingencies that all politicians confront (both those that may be advantageous and those that threaten disruption).

Hurst's decision to work along these lines yields an illuminating analysis that he could have pressed further by turning to Michael Oakeshott (a political philosopher whose thinking influenced Cowling). While Oakeshott recognised that the results of ‘political activity’ can be ‘valuable’, he identified politicians as often hampered by an inability to bring into focus and respond effectively to the circumstances that confront them (M. J. Oakeshott, ‘The Claims of Politics’, Scrutiny, vol. 8, 1938–9, pp. 148–149).

Hurst's exposition gives prominence to a number of speeches that feature regularly in accounts of modern British history. They include Thatcher's response to an attack on her by Red Star (an organ of the Soviet Union) in January 1976 (less than a year after she became the leader of the opposition). Red Star mockingly dubbed her ‘the Iron Lady’. The purpose of this attack was to present her as an absurd figure who struck Churchillian poses in the context of a society that had ceased to be a great power. Thatcher responded by making a speech in which she celebrated her new name and, in this way, raised her profile as a ‘Cold War warrior’.

In this speech, we can see the combination of rhetoric and responsiveness to contingency that features in Cowling's account of high politics. The same point applies to Thatcher's speech at the Conservative Party's annual conference in 1980. She delivered this speech at a time when unemployment was rising rapidly and calls for her government to change economic course (by pivoting away from monetarism) were growing louder. But Thatcher—while ready to concede that ‘the level of unemployment in our country today is a human tragedy’—was unyielding. She made this clear when she intoned the words: ‘You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning’. These words enabled her to underscore the difference between her approach to government and that of her Conservative predecessor, Edward Heath (who, in opposition, championed the free market and, in government, embraced statutory incomes policies).

Speeches such as these clearly gave expression to declarative aims of the sort that Hurst describes. He finds in them a basis on which to present Thatcher as a prime minister who, by the mid-1980s, could assume the existence of a market-oriented social consensus. However, he notes that she saw it as a consensus that stood in need of consolidation. This is a point that he supports by reference to Thatcher's annual conference speech in 1986. In this speech, she pursued the theme that ‘popular capitalism is nothing less than a crusade to enfranchise the many’. Moreover, she identified this crusade as a basis on which to sustain ‘one nation’. Hurst sets alongside speeches that advanced her policy agenda, others that gave rise to sustained disagreement. Thatcher's 1988 Bruges speech, for example, was a sharp critique of the European Community (now EU) as a legal order that posed a threat to the United Kingdom as a sovereign state. Hurst notes that, when Thatcher made this speech, she breathed life into a force—‘Euroscepticism’—that would become a source of bitter and continuing disagreement in British politics.

As well as offering a clear account of Thatcher's speeches as historical landmarks, Hurst examines, in fine-grained detail, the compositional processes that brought them into existence. Here, Thatcher's doubts as to her ability to write effective speeches provide the starting point of his exposition. These doubts led her to recruit writers—‘Thatcher's people’—who could produce text with an assurance and flair that she lacked. This group included, for example, Alfred Sherman (‘a former communist who [had] experienced poverty in the East End’) and Ronnie Millar (who had studied classical rhetoric in Cambridge and written scripts for MGM in Hollywood).

Hurst tells us that Thatcher ‘welcomed opportunities to debate … policy’ with her ‘people’. He adds that ‘messiness’ was a feature of the way in which she and they worked. This was because they had to compose speeches ‘on the hoof’. But while this messiness was unavoidable, Thatcher described herself as striving to ‘say things [in] the best way’. Here, Hurst might have forged a tighter link between Thatcher's words and her desire to exercise declarative leadership. She clearly sought to use language with sufficient clarity to prompt people to behave in particular ways.

Thatcher's commitment to clarity in the use of language sits uneasily alongside the account of political activity that Michael Oakeshott offers. According to Oakeshott, politicians typically approach the matters that they seek to address in a ‘mental fog’. He also argues that their minds are ‘fixed and callous to all subtle distinctions’. These points lead him to conclude that ‘false simplification’ is typically a feature of politicians’ thinking. But these deficiencies should not, on Oakeshott's account, surprise us. Politicians have to engage with an array of matters—including contingencies that they cannot anticipate in advance of their occurrence.

Oakeshott's reflections are relevant to Hurst's analysis since they give us tools with which to probe the claim that Thatcher was a practitioner of high politics. She certainly impressed on her compatriots and others her commitment to the promotion of market activity and the successful prosecution of the Cold War. Moreover, she did so in terms (for example, ‘the Iron Lady’ and ‘popular capitalism’) that simplified the matters on which she focused her attention. But, on occasion, the urge to simplify complexity could undercut her efforts to advance her policy agenda. For example, in her Bruges speech she deployed a Eurosceptic rhetoric that would, two years later, spur Sir Geoffrey Howe, Michael Heseltine and others to drive her from power.

These points bring into focus a source of strength in Hurst's exposition that extends beyond his concern with Thatcher. He alerts his readers to the pressures that bear on politicians as they seek to make constructive responses to the contingencies they have to confront. More particularly, he focuses his readers’ attention on the search for words that will become the stuff of declarative leadership by prompting people to behave in particular ways. Thatcher succeeded in finding words that marked her out as a Cold War warrior and fostered enthusiasm for the free market. However, she failed to pick out the dangers that lurked in the political terrain through which she moved in her Bruges speech. Thus, we should set alongside Hurst's emphasis on Thatcher's ability to practise high politics her vulnerability to the dangers posed by mental fog.

Making Speeches: The Speechmaking of Margaret Thatcher, 1975–1990, by Tom Hurst. Bloomsbury. 202 pp. £28.99