The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History by Boris Johnson Page B

People are starting to whisper and look at the floor. This is what happened to Randolph, they say; poor young chap, going the way of his father—overwhelmed by a horrible premature senility. At last he sits down. ‘I thank the House for having listened to me,’ he says in despair, and covers his head with his hands.
    The following day the papers are full of Mr Churchill’s shipwreck, and a famous nerve specialist is called upon to diagnose the cause. It is a case, says the doctor, of ‘defective cerebration’. Well, there can’tbe a person in the world who hasn’t at some time suffered from defective cerebration—a useful-sounding disorder—but that wasn’t really the problem with Winston Churchill that day.
    If we have one unshakeable and instinctive conviction about him, it is that he was the greatest public speaker of the last hundred years; definitely the greatest orator Britain has produced, and perhaps even knocking Martin Luther King off the global number-one spot. He is the only politician whose speeches and speaking style can still be parodied by people of all ages.
    Ah, Churchill! we say, and we jut our chins and recite something, in that familiar sing-song growl, about fighting them on the beaches. He stands in relation to oratory as Shakespeare stands to the writing of plays: the top performer, a mixture of Pericles and Abraham Lincoln with a small but irrefutable dash of Les Dawson.
    We think of him as somehow supernaturally gifted, as if he had sprung from a union of Zeus and Polyhymnia the very Muse of Rhetoric. I am afraid we are only partly right.
    The truth is that he was a genius in his own way, but he wasn’t really a natural. He was no Lloyd George; he was no Luther King, at least in the sense that he could not improvise as some born speakers can; and when he spoke it certainly did not pour from his full heart in profuse strains of unpremeditated art.
    Churchill’s speeches were a triumph of effort, and preparation, in which phrases were revised and licked into shape as a she-bear licks her cubs. Dancing before him like a will-o’-the-wisp was always the ghostly luminescence of his father’s reputation, and as he grows up we can feel him straining and yearning in emulation.
    We catch him at Harrow, speaking up noisily in a debate with senior boys. As a Sandhurst subaltern, he makes a passionate defence of the right of some prostitutes to frequent the bar of the Empire inLeicester Square. ‘Ladies of the Empire,’ says the nineteen-year-old virgin, rising on a stool amid his guffawing comrades, ‘I stand for liberty!’
    It is not immediately obvious why this subject—the freedom of prostitutes to ply their trade—should have prompted the first public speech by Britain’s greatest statesman.
    There is no evidence of any reward for his intervention, carnal or otherwise. The answer is surely that it was a jape. He wanted to draw attention to himself—and he succeeded. The speech was reported in the papers.
    By the age of twenty-three he thought himself a sufficiently experienced orator to write an essay on the subject called ‘The Scaffolding of Rhetoric’. This is a splendidly portentous and self-confident document—never published in his lifetime—in which he seems to be analysing what he obviously considers to be his own success. ‘Sometimes a slight and not unpleasing stammer or impediment has been of some assistance in securing the attention of the audience,’ he says—a point that may not be unconnected with his lisp, and what he claimed was an obstructive ligament in his tongue, unknown to the anatomy of any other human being.
    He goes on to describe the effects of his prescribed methods on the human herd: ‘The cheers become louder and more frequent; the enthusiasm momentarily increases; until they are convulsed by emotions they are unable to control and shaken by passions of which they have resigned all direction.’ That is certainly a trick that some orators have been