Hello and welcome to The Spectator Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by the Times columnist Philip Collins, a former speechwriter for Tony Blair,

and the author of a new book on political speech writing through the ages called, I have to get this right,

when they go low. Phil, welcome. Now, this book is more than just a collection of famous speeches

with, you know, glosses on them. It also kind of presents an argument. I mean, can you tell me

what you have tried to do in the book? It seems to me like it's a sort of defense of rhetoric as an art and democracy itself through that.

It is. It's exactly that. I'd realize there are a lot of anthologies out there on the market, and there's lots of books which collect the great speeches.

And my first thought was I wanted to analyze the best speeches and work out how they worked and why they're so good.

And I then realized that there was a much bigger story to tell.

And you find it in Pericles and in Cicero, two speeches, which I look at.

The discipline of rhetoric and the form of democracy are born at the same time in Greece.

And the democracy becomes the moment when speech becomes necessary, because that's then

the currency of persuasion. And Cicero in De Oratory unites the two disciplines. For him, rhetoric is not

the art of speaking. It's statecraft. It's the very same thing. So I realized that these two things

were essentially the same. They had parallel histories. and that we're at a moment right now when that great bequest of democracy is under threat from populists.

There's a lot of cynicism about politics.

And so I thought I gathered together 25 wonderful speeches which collectively tell the story of change for the better through politics.

And so that's the story I tell and that's the defence that I make.

It's a defence of rhetoric, but by implication it's also a defence of democracy.

And you do also, you've sort of divided it into five chunks, which I was interested in the particular, you know, what caused you to do that?

I wanted to get that story, but tell that story rather obliquely. I didn't want it to be a simple,

straightforward narrative. I wanted it to be essayistic. So I wanted the essays to be able to

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