MPs' poor public-speaking skills are bad for democracy

Lamentably few Members of today's Commons know how to seize and retain the attention of the House. They are politicians. Public speaking should be, to them, as important as a steady rifle grip is to an assassin or the ability to whip up a plate of scrambled egg is to a short-order chef. And yet this most basic of skills eludes many MPs. How feeble, and what a pity for our parliamentary democracy.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet contains some astonishingly bad speechifyers. If the two words 'Geoff' and 'Hoon' do not send you instantly to sleep, 'John Denham', 'Jacqui Smith', 'Alistair Darling' and 'Jim Murphy' soon will.

These ministers barely raise or lower their voices. Words plop from their lips at a deadly, predictable rhythm. Among the junior ministers, even more interesting personalities such as David Lammy, Phil Woolas and Vera Baird are disappointingly weak at the Despatch Box.

Those last three all have something to say and something to represent yet they sick up their ministerial statements without aplomb. It is as though they feel too embarrassed even to try. It is no wonder the electorate often does not bother to vote.

Generations of undergraduate politicians have benefited from their studenty jousts

One hesitates (though not long) to sound like an elitist but we might have a better standard of oratory from the green leather benches if more MPs had belonged to debating societies such as the Cambridge Union.

The Union, founded in 1815, is nowadays invariably seen as a fount of toffish arrogance, a place where white-tied Berties exercise their Adam's apples and - fnarr fnarr - score points of order off one another like fencing Osrics.

Like all stereotypes it is not entirely unjustified but it makes too blunt a point. A reasonably interesting history of the Union (Arena of Ambition – A History of the Cambridge Union, by Stephen Parkinson, Icon Books, £20) has just been written. It shows that past generations of undergraduate politicians benefited greatly from their studenty jousts. Those early attempts at building and conveying an argument, sometimes in the face of an over-refreshed throng, helped to create some of the big beasts of Westminster politics.

Michael Howard learned as a youngster that stinging sensation  you experience when you have been whacked in a debate. As an undergraduate he appeared at the Cambridge Union opposite Richard Crossman.

Future Home Secretary Howard recalls that he made "a typically moderate Conservative, Bow Group-type speech" - which was duly shredded by Crossman. The Labour grandee used a repeated rhetorical device which mocked moderate Tories for caring about the poor "ALMOST as much as the Labour party does". Forty eight years on, Michael Howard recalls that "it completely ripped me apart".

Indeed, all Union speakers learn early the merit of repartee. Arianna Huffington (Stassinopoulos, as was), a star of the Union in the early 1970s, spoke alongside J.K. Galbraith on the motion "The Market is a Snare and a Delusion".

University debating is the best way of training for the cockpit of our democracy

They were up against the American conservative William F. Buckley. Galbraith made a poor speech and then bullied Stassinopoulos into making an intervention on the free-marketeer Buckley. Galbraith got her to say that some markets were too imperfect to be free. Buckley, sizing up his beautiful interjector's Hellenic curves, replied at once: "Well, Madam, I do not know what market YOU patronise..." Collapse of House into laughter, Huffington today saying that she can "still feel my cheeks burning as I sat down".

Today's best Commons performers employ the slightly arch style of the university debating parlours for the simple reason that it works. Of the younger ones, I'm thinking of the likes of Michael Gove, David Miliband, Chris Bryant. If only we had more of them.

There is a Tory called Bercow who rates himself a great orator but is in fact dreadful because he almost completely lacks wit. He does not have the self-mockery which is beaten into college debaters.

Unless you have a natural, electric talent like non-college boy George Galloway, or a lifetime's experience in the pulpit (Ian Paisley) or a suave, public-school charm (Blair, Cameron), university debating is the best way of training for the cockpit of our democracy.

Former Union members know to speak clearly, briskly, without just enough assertion but not too much pomposity, and to leaven it with wit. It's called "communicating" and it is an awful pity there are not more of them who can do it.

Now that elitism is so outre, however, and now that the appalling Edward Balls is wrecking Cambridge and Oxford Universities, it seems unlikely that ex-Union hacks will in future attain much  prominence. ·