On November 22, 2021, the fifty-eighth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one of the great public orators of the twentieth century, two landmark moments in European political rhetoric took place.

The first was a statement by Germany’s Health Minister Jens Spahn in relation to the resurgence of the Covid-19 crisis that was threatening to overwhelm his country. In an extraordinary tour-de-force of stark verbal efficiency, Herr Spahn told a news conference that ‘by the end of this winter everyone in Germany will either be vaccinated, recovered, or dead’. It was the soundbite to end all soundbites, a triumph of the rhetorical economy that would have put President Kennedy’s ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ to shame.

On the same day in the UK, a very different story unfolded. The British Prime Minister was giving a speech to a conference of business leaders when he appeared to lose his place in his speech. What followed was described as ‘shambolic’ by the Shadow Chancellor and prompted one journalist to ask him afterward: ‘Frankly, is everything okay?’ An anonymous source inside Downing Street even echoed the Labour perspective when they told the BBC that ‘business was really looking for leadership today and it was shambolic’. Two days later in parliament, while the chamber resounded with mocking calls from opposition MPs, the Scottish Nationalists’ Westminster leader told Mr. Johnson that, while the country was suffering an economic crisis and cried out for competent leadership, its Prime Minister was not even capable of delivering ‘a coherent speech to business leaders’.

So, what had gone so horribly wrong with what should have been a pretty easy address to a relatively friendly audience? British industrialists tend to favour the Tories, and most even appeared by now to have forgiven Mr. Johnson for the somewhat undiplomatic response he had voiced in June 2018 to the concerns businesses had expressed over the possibility of a hard Brexit: ‘F*ck business.’ What, after all, could possibly have been worse than that?

This was what could have been worse and was. Twenty-five minutes into his speech to the Confederation of British Industry, the Prime Minister had started talking about Peppa Pig. Yes, you heard that right. The absurd yet adored children’s cartoon character, the plump little porker, the inexplicably popular, two-dimensional TV star… talked about Peppa Pig.

He told the assembly of business leaders that the previous day he had visited the amusement park Peppa Pig World. ‘I was a bit hazy about what I would find at Peppa Pig World, but I loved it,’ he said. ‘Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place.’ He went out to declare that Peppa Pig represented a business worth at least £6 billion to the UK, but he neglected to mention that in fact that £6 billion was the sum for which the franchise had been sold to the American multinational Hasbro in 2019. He then proceeded to criticize the stereotypical representation of Peppa Pig’s father, Daddy Pig. 

The following day, the Sun newspaper – usually one of his more ardent supporters in the UK press – described Mr. Johnson’s speech as ‘rambling’ and ‘bizarre’. It added that the Prime Minister ‘went on to make an odd comment suggesting Brits would flock back to offices to have sex.’

He had indeed appeared to have done so in a reference to ‘Mother Nature’ preferring people to get together – there being ‘strong evolutionary reasons’ for ‘young people’ to come together to ‘pick up social capital’.

He had then observed that electric cars did not ‘burble like sucking doves’ before launching into an impression of a petrol engine. This was translated into text by the BBC report as ‘'vrrrom vrrrom raaah raaah’ and by the government’s own website as ‘arum arum araaaaaagh’. This is serious. This is not a joke.

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Laying down his principles of environmental sustainability, he equated himself with Moses when he explained how he ‘came down from Sinai and said the new ten commandments thou shalt develop’. He rounded things off in a particularly eccentric fashion by quoting the revolutionary Soviet leader Lenin. Lenin has not in the past been a standard source of quotations for British Conservative premiers. This was all in one speech.

We may admit that the chambers of the UK parliament have in recent years rarely echoed with classic performances of sustained rhetoric, speeches of historic proportions that have endured in the national memory. British politics has however produced a number of short sharp epithets that have proven highly effective in the realm of rolling news and digital audiences with reduced attention spans. Thus, Tony Blair drew plaudits when he famously announced that his three priorities in government were ‘education, education, education’. David Cameron later responded that his priority could be summed up not in three words but in three letters – ‘NHS’. Theresa May notoriously accused the Labour Party of believing that their spending plans might be supported by the existence of a ‘magic money tree’.

The rambling Mr. Johnson hasn’t really nailed a soundbite since his 2019 election pledge to ‘get Brexit done’. That election campaign was masterminded by Vote Leave’s director and chief strategist Dominic Cummings – the sloganeer who had once exhorted Britain to ‘take back control’. Johnson likes to think of himself as a modern Winston Churchill, though he lacks both Churchill’s gravitas and his capacity to turn a beautiful and memorable phrase. In consequence, his monologues tend to go off at tangents and get tangled in their own verbosity. As he lollops around like a demented bear, his prattling non-sequiturs and arrant nonsense may sometimes amuse; but they never inspire. He is like a man who wears an interesting hat in place of developing an interesting personality – a man whose inane quips have long since stopped prompting appreciative laughter and have started to provoke the nervous smiles of those who realise that they have entrusted the country's nuclear codes to a gibbering fool. His behaviour has always been quirky, but his latest antics have taken his personal idiosyncrasies to a whole new level of weirdness.

Boris Johnson is not a great speaker, but in this, as in all things, he has usually got away with faking it – by bamboozling his listeners with his typically bullish bombast. Of course, his lack of true rhetorical power is not purely a matter of style and tone. Content and intent also of course count. Great speech does not emerge from a paucity of ideas or a weakness of spirit. When JFK called upon his fellow Americans to ‘ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’ – and when he declared that we choose great challenges ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard’ – he was laying out a moral manifesto entirely antithetical to the lazy, self-interested and cynical agenda promulgated by Boris Johnson.

Politicians are in many ways simply linguistic constructs. They are creatures of words, though they cannot always be taken at their words. What they do is speak. It makes them what they are. They are only what they say, although they are hardly ever what they say are. Talking is how they make things happen. Persuasion is their first talent and for many their only one. That’s why these things matter so much, and why the cool precision of a German health minister’s words, or the rousing passion of a long-dead American President’s, continue to strike us with such force. It is also why it is viewed as a serious breach of parliamentary conduct for one British MP to call another a liar. And it is why the British Prime Minister’s increasingly erratic forms of expression elicit not only ridicule but also a growing sense of anxiety and unease.

Following his speech to the CBI, however, it soon became clear that Mr. Johnson did not hold a monopoly among members of his own party in acts of extreme oratorical imbecility. On 25 November, possibly in a bid to make his boss look a little less asinine by comparison, one Tory MP told parliament that the reason for high levels of criminal activity among young men was that the BBC had chosen to cast a female lead in its long-running science fiction series Doctor Who. The chair of the Labour Party responded, not unreasonably, that she had assumed she must have misheard him. Meanwhile, as the Prime Minister blustered like a punctured blimp, the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition launched his broadsides not with muskets blazing but with all the soul-destroying monotone of a whining mosquito, a frail insect unable to score more than a pinprick of his opponent’s blood.

For Sir Keir Starmer is just as poor an orator as Mr. Johnson, although in precisely the opposite way. Where Johnson sprays forth drivel as indiscriminately as a blundering blunderbuss, Sir Keir boasts the verbal firepower of a peashooter without a pea.

How then has it come to this? This is the birthplace of the parliamentary debate. This is the land of Churchill and Gladstone, of Austen, Dickens, and Shakespeare, for goodness’ sake, the home of Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Judi Dench. It seems almost impossible to understand why Britain is suddenly faced with a generation of leaders who can barely string a coherent sentence together. It may be that the country’s diminishing economic and cultural strengths and its own sense of its dwindling political influence on the global stage have fostered a lack of national self-confidence which attracts unambitious electorates towards mediocrity and even shameless idiocy. Or perhaps this current situation may merely represent a rare coincidence of unfortunate political circumstances, and that, like bright metal on a sullen ground, there may one day emerge once more a clear new voice which will revitalize Britain’s politics and its democratic discourse. 

On the evening of Saturday 27 November, a much more focused and somber Boris Johnson addressed the nation to outline the sobering news of the latest emergency measures his government was imposing in response to the emergence of the omicron variant of Covid-19. Television audiences might be forgiven for wondering whether this might have heralded a new seriousness and clarity for Britain's leadership. It is only to be hoped that it might. 

BBC Radio's satirical comedy show Dead Ringers regularly portrays Mr. Johnson as a split personality yoyoing between the polar opposites of ‘good Boris’ and ‘bad Boris’. There appears a certain amount of truth in this. Rather than Shakespeare’s idle Prince Hal transformed into the glorious figure of King Henry V., Mr. Johnson has frequently seemed something of a Jekyll-and-Hyde character; and at this critical time – this time of the global pandemic, a climate emergency and economic crisis – its Prime Minister’s emotional vacillations have only served to exacerbate the country’s desperate uncertainties.

Times of crisis sometimes give rise to great leadership; but, sadly, more often they mire public life in the petty rivalries of tedious time-serving careerists and brash self-serving opportunists. It remains to be seen whether the United Kingdom will remain sufficiently united to continue to weather this storm, but it seems evident that the survival of the union – the fate of the nation as we know it – may depend on it.