One of the consequences of living in a ‘liberal’ society is that we like to pretend that political conflicts do not exist.
Immigration is necessary because we need a flourishing economy – so anyone who objects to immigration is undermining essential public services, like the NHS, and who would do that?
You get to a situation where politics is managed by a cadre of individuals who make all the important choices, and then ask the electorate to legitimise them.
It is for this reason that political oratory has gone out of fashion, and at the same time is coming back into fashion.
The idea of persuading people to reject certain policies through emotional language is labelled as ‘populism’.
However, as the late Dr Max Atkinson pointed out in his books, keeping your audience awake is a responsibility of every politician, and to do that you need to acknowledge conflict and master some of the basic rhetorical formulae that have characterised political discourse since it first emerged in Ancient Greece.
All this is background context to the fringe event organised by the UK Speechwriters’ Guild and Steffan Aquarone MP at the Liberal Democrat conference in Bournemouth this week.
We had a panel discussion on ‘how to embrace populism’ which was very out of kilter with the mood of the conference that seemed to want to revile the Reform Party rather than reading the runes of their rampant success.
The focus of the meeting was to pay tribute to Dr Max Atkinson, who died in 2024, and who worked as Paddy Ashdown’s speechwriter for many years.
Simon Atkinson, son of Max, gave us an introduction into the theories Max outlined in his books, Our Masters’ Voices and Lend Me Your Ears.
New MP, Steffan, confessed that he’d gone into politics thinking he’d never use a speechwriter, only to discover that he had to rely on his researcher to write all his House of Commons performances so far.
Introducing any innovation to something as traditional as a party conference is always fraught with difficulty, but we managed to launch a new competition after our fringe event was over.
It was billed as ‘Britain’s Next Prime Minister’, and was designed to be a platform for ordinary members to practice their rhetorical skills.
We made our way to the Purbeck Bar in the Bournemouth International Centre, which was deserted.
Miraculously we found a wooden box behind the bar which served as a soapbox for the speakers to stand on.
After a fashion, we had seven entries and after three had spoken, a member of the BIC security tried to turf us out of the building for overstaying our welcome.
Thankfully we negotiated some time to complete the contest. We were able to give the speakers some feedback and Steffan Aquarone was able to present the first, ‘Max Atkinson Award for Political Oratory’ to Matt Thomas, who is from Norfolk and has been a LibDem for three years.
Matt has pledged to defend his title in 2026.