Tom Tugendhat’s speech was a masterclass in oratory

An ounce of emotion, it has been said, is worth a ton of fact. Tom Tugendhat’s remarkable speech to the Commons today was delivered with a current of emotion – pathos, as scholars of oratory call it – that was all the more electric for its restraint. His jaw clenched and trembled; his voice, now and again, seemed on the verge of faltering. As he said in his opening words:

‘Like many veterans, this last week has been one that has seen me struggle through anger, and grief, and rage. The feeling of abandonment of not just a country but the sacrifice that my friends made. I’ve been to funerals from Poole to Dunblane. I’ve watched good men go into the earth, taking with them a part of me and a part of all of us.’

But to see that speech as an uncontrolled outburst of feeling would be to ignore the way in which Tugendhat’s emotion was given shape by his mastery of rhetorical technique. I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being anthologised and taught in schools.

Take even that opening. There’s a very great deal going on in it. He began by establishing the most important of Aristotle’s triad of rhetorical appeals: ethos, that is, his right to speak. He speaks with the authority of a military veteran, and with the personal connection of a grieving friend. His feeling is presented not as individual but as representative. The movement from ‘me’ to ‘friends’ to ‘all of us’ is the same rhetorical sweep traced by ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’.

The cadences of the speech are careful. ‘Anger, grief, and rage’ is a tricolon. Never mind that its third term is arguably a synonym for the first: it’s a more emphatic synonym; it conveys emotion rising. You can hear an Oxford comma in the delivery, and the pause makes the final term land harder.

Then there are euphonious doublets yoked by zeugma: abandonment governs ‘a country’ but also ‘a sacrifice’; ‘taking with them’ governs ‘a part of me’ and ‘a part of all of us’. ‘Poole’ is yoked to ‘Dunblane’ – and it’s no accident that they are at opposite ends of the country. Tugendhat’s authority is consolidated by his status as a witness, in the gathering force of anaphora: ‘I’ve been… I’ve watched…’

We’re shuttling between the abstract and the concrete. Here is a ‘country’ many miles away; and then here are the names of provincial British towns. Here are concepts like abandonment and sacrifice; then here are individual men going ‘into the earth’. And that is to establish early on the theme of his speech – that what happens over there means something here; that the human consequences of abstract geopolitical decisions touch us where we live.

‘Afghanistan is not a far country about which we know little,’ he went on to say. ‘It is part of the main.’ Here‘s a double allusion. The first is, rather pointedly, to Neville Chamberlain’s remarks about the Sudetenland. The second is to John Donne: ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.’ At once you’re given not just a historical sweep but, in borrowing the grandeur and authority of Donne’s words, a wider moral and human resonance.

The emotion rises again when he talks about President Biden’s characterisation of his soldiers as having ‘run’. Again, he offers ethos, a personal connection: he was decorated by the 82^nd Airborne. His criticism is the stronger for being delivered with overt regret and in two words: ‘It’s shameful’. He adds (which is no doubt a moot point intellectually but fiercely effective as oratory): ‘Those who have never fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.’

The artfulness continues. Phrases settle naturally into tricolons: ‘to our European partners, to our European neighbours and to our international friends.’ One three-part anaphora had, to my ear, an almost Biblical ring: ‘Nations endure. Nations mobilise and muster. Nations determine, and have patience.’ 

And here he is speaking more like a preacher expatiating on a moral virtue than an MP, glossing ‘patience’ in a run of epistrophe (where you repeat the same word or phrase at the end of successive sentences): 

‘The Cold War was won with patience. Cyprus is at peace with patience. South Korea, with more than ten times the number of troops that America had in Afghanistan, is prosperous to patience.’

In this revival-tent rhetorical mode, he says of the refugee crisis: 

‘I’m not going to get into the political auction of numbers. We just need to get people out.’

You could object that arguing about numbers is exactly what members of the House of Commons are there to do – but good luck trying that in this rhetorical context. A petty ‘political auction’ is cast as a distraction from an urgent and feeling moral imperative.

The speech closes with two images – enargia, painting mental pictures – which like all the best such oratorical flourishes are both metaphors and insistently particular in themselves. There’s little Afghan girls going to school (not just any little Afghan girls, but the ones the speaker helped to do so and witnessed doing so) and little English girls going to school (not just any little English girls, but the speaker’s daughters).

And then in counterpoint there’s the unnamed father carrying a dead child in his arms – again, given authority by Tugendhat’s own experience – who not only stands as a warning of what further war brings to individuals, but as a metaphor: ‘This is what defeat looks like, when you no longer have a choice of how to help’.

This was a bravura piece of oratory – and its formal excellence as rhetoric does not mean that the emotion it carried and the argument it made should be seen as insincere. Quite the opposite. To speak well, to speak artfully, is to take real emotion and real moral concern and weaponise it in the service of a cause. That, after all, is what that Pugin talking shop in Westminster is for.