My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister.
The dilemma matches the two-edged meaning of rhetoric these days. President Obama was said to have got to the White House thanks to his rhetoric, but now his rhetoric is being compared unfavourably with his achievement. Similarly, Iran’s suggestion that Israel should be obliterated is called rhetoric, while Haaretz says: ‘Netanyahu has escalated his rhetoric on Iran.’ It is part of the slide of rhetorical from the meaning ‘expressed in terms intended to persuade’ to being, as the OED puts it, ‘in later use sometimes mildly depreciative’.
No doubt Mr Johnson is familiar with Aristotle and Cicero on rhetoric. But has he also looked into Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1554), the first treatise on rhetoric in English popular among politicians? ‘It is a pleasaunt dissembling,’ says Wilson, ‘when we speake one thing merily and thinke an other earnestly.’ Perhaps this was in Mr Johnson’s mind when he commented on David Cameron’s declaration on the David Letterman show that he didn’t know what Magna Carta meant. ‘I think he knew full well what Magna Carta means,’ Mr Johnson commented on LBC. ‘It was a brilliant move in order to show his demotic credentials.’
Some of Wilson’s other advice to politicians might not be very helpful now: ‘Oftentimes the deformitie of a mans bodie, giveth matter enough to bee right merie.’ Most of Book II of his work is a catena of lamentable jokes.
Yet Wilson makes a good point about making people laugh in public speaking. ‘Surely fewe there be that have this gift, in due time to cheare men. Neither can any do it, whom Nature hath not framed, and given an aptnesse thereunto.’ Wilson was aware of the Tommy Cooper effect: ‘Some mans countenance will make pastime, though he speake never a worde.’ He might have been thinking of Boris Johnson.
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