The battle rages on about the Mail on Sunday story that last weekend accused Angela Rayner of using her sexual wiles to distract the prime minister. Lindsay Hoyle, the House of Commons Speaker, summoned the newspaper’s editor to account for this bizarre eruption of misogyny. In the name of “free speech”, a notion that becomes more laughable as the flaws it seeks to justify mount up, its sister paper, the Daily Mail, filled Wednesday’s front page with the words: “No, Mr Speaker!”
However, what has troubled me most is not the assertion that, in having legs and sometimes moving them, Labour’s deputy leader was trying to distract and manipulate Boris Johnson. It’s not a million years ago (actually, five) that the same newspaper headlined a meeting between Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May “Never mind Brexit, who won Legs-it!”. Both women were wearing tights, you see, so they were asking for it.
No, what bothered me, because it seems to be more readily and widely parroted, was this line: “[Rayner] knows she can’t compete with Boris’s Oxford Union debating training, but she has other skills which he lacks.”
This idea that Oxford and, before it, Eton teach rhetorical skills that are beyond the imagination of ordinary people is deployed to a specific purpose. It’s a way to disinfect snobbery. It doesn’t do a brilliant job, you still wouldn’t eat off it, but it is more socially acceptable than saying straight out “a rich person will always be better, more intelligent and persuasive than someone from a council estate”.
However, even those without a wealth-supremacy agenda swallow these ideas relating to posh people and their magic speech-making abilities. In Simon Kuper’s book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, he meticulously traces this notion back to its foundations. The union – of which Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Theresa May, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Nick Robinson and a host of others in British politics were members – he describes as “a kind of children’s House of Commons” that features busts of former prime ministers.
The debates there create a “spirit of unashamed glamour, excitement and competition” (according to Michael Gove). It is a place where Old Etonians have a “huge head start”, having already had debates with “incredible heavy-hitters” who had come to visit them at school (says Rachel Johnson, the prime minister’s sister). Or, as Kuper writes: “The Tory public schoolboys arrived at Oxford almost fully formed.” They left, he says, as a class of people who didn’t particularly aspire to change “anybody’s lives except their own”. And that relentless self-interest is, at least, demonstrable.
I can’t speak with total authority, as I was a member of the Oxford Union later than Gove et al. But a class of “fully formed” rhetoricians I did not see. I went to just one debate; it was some provocation about the film industry in which the film producer (and now peer) David Putnam was speaking. He said something along the lines of, “The main difference between us is that I actually care about films and you don’t.” For me, this seemed to sum up the entire process. There were a lot of boys, who seemed a lot younger than they were, making points on a theme about which they knew very little and cared about even less. It was only “glamorous” if you were impressed by people who could parade their ignorance without being embarrassed.
Does Johnson actually have any real debating prowess? He certainly doesn’t have a memorable turn of phrase. His analogies are pedestrian and baggy. He impresses people by quoting Latin, unless they themselves are classically educated, in which case they can usually pinpoint his knowledge as topping out at around 15 years old. He is rattled very easily in debate, and tends not to build an argument with rhetoric so much as string together one tired one-liner after another.
His intoxicating charm, his disarming wit: how to square these traits that people insist upon with the bruiser we see before us, rambling on about Peppa Pig World? Dominic Cummings can catch attention mainly with the force of his certainty. Rees-Mogg uses his drawl more than his words to convey that he is omniscient to the point of perpetual boredom. If you got an actor to voice his utterances, you’d hear them for what they are, a lot of “do as you’re told”, or the occasional law of cricket.
The accents of these former Oxford Union types are so laboured that it’s more like a vocal cosplay of aristocracy than an authentic voice; the flights into Latin, Greek or the private language of closed educational communities are there to exclude, not to inspire. When they stoop to make a joke that the masses will understand, it’s incredibly lame. (Turns out I can recall one speech of Johnson’s, an early levelling-up event in 2021: “It is an outrage that a man in Glasgow or Blackpool has an average of 10 years less on this planet than someone growing up in … Rutland. I don’t know what the people of Rutland do to live to such prodigious ages … but they do!” Geddit? GEDDIT? It’s because they rut.)
This is not a timeless tragedy of British public life: many decades went by when an expensive education was nothing to peacock, still less did we in any way agree that it made you a more able speaker, thinker or politician. It is a distinctly modern fallacy.
When we accept this verbal prowess at face value, it’s to avoid asking the deeper question: what form of stubborn self-hatred has taken hold of the electorate that any of us – voters, commentators, pollsters, bystanders – would venerate these people? Because the real distinction of their rhetoric is the sheer boldness of its contempt for us.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
