Inspired by last week’s New Statesman cover piece, we at Coffee House Central figured we’d pick out some of our favourite political speeches. You can find them listed below – along with our comments and YouTube footage, if availiable. Do mention any of your own favourites in the comments section. I’ll get the ball rolling with my own pick…
Peter Hoskin
Disagree with the man, disagree with his politics; but there’s little denying that John F. Kennedy was one of the great political orators of the Twentieth Century. He may have made better speeches, but his 1962 address to Rice University – on the NASA moon landing program – strikes a chord in me like no other. Here, simply, is American Achievement spelt out in the most poignant and ideologically strident terms. But it’s something more than that; a personal constitution, even. The speech’s most famous line – “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” – sums up so much about what’s important in this life. That the Apollo 11 mission did reach the moon before the decade’s close makes it all the more powerful.
Matthew d’Ancona
I would nominate Michael Portillo’s speech at a fringe event at the 1997 Tory conference. Remember the context: but a few months before, the Tory Party had been annihilated in the general election, and Portillo himself had been symbolically ousted from his Enfield seat. “Portillo’s on the dole” was the chant on May 2, 1997. He was the Guy Fawkes thrown on the bonfire of New Labour Britain in its most celebratory moment.
The speech he delivered at an event organised by the Centre for Policy Studies was an unforgettable moment in Tory intellectual history. Portillo held up a mirror to the Conservative Caliban and demanded that his tribe confront its collective crisis as he had confronted his own rejection by the electorate. It would take eight further years of internal squabbling and two more general election defeats before the party accepted his core message and embraced the modernising agenda of David Cameron (not yet a disciple of modernisation in those days). But this was the foundation text of all that has followed since.
James Forsyth
Ronald Reagan’s speech on the 40th anniversary of D-Day was, perhaps, the finest ever made by the great communicator. Delivered with the veterans who had seized the German gun-points on this Normandy cliff sitting in front of him, the speech contains one of the most moving passages in presidential speechwriting:
“These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.”
But the speech was also an eloquent statement of the values that led the Allies to resist tyranny. Few would have dared dream then that five years later, eastern Europe would finally be fully liberated.
Let us hope that the world never forgets what Reagan called the bitter lesson of the two World Wars:
“We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent.”
Fraser Nelson
For me, a rather odd choice: Reagan announcing in January 1983 that he will stand for the presidency again. It quickly lists the amazing progress he’d made in three short years: a wonderful contrast from British politics where we’re told by unambitious politicians that nothing meaningful can be accomplished in a parliamentary term. Some phrases – “abusive overtaxation” – speak volumes. And he attributes the failure of the 1970s to “a failure here in Washington to trust the courage and character of you, the people.”
The likes Obama have developed Reagan’s proto-wiki theme (I’m not asking you to believe in my power to change America, I’m asking you believe in yours). But to him, it wasn’t a soundbite. It was a real, practical agenda that he implemented to spectacular results. And it was a speech that only a conservative is capable of making sincerely because only conservatives believe in the wisdom of the masses: that countries are better, fairer and stronger the more power ordinary people have.
The dividing line in politics is simple: trust the state, or trust the people. Reagan says he trusted the people, and wants permission to do it for a (very successful) second term. It is his fusion of triumph, humility and optimism (and, actually, brevity) that makes it stick out.
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