Tory strife at No 10 is nothing new. Thirty years ago, Geoffrey Howe saw off Margaret Thatcher with one lethal speech What makes a truly great speech? The ancient Greeks – who knew a thing or two about oratory – reckoned the most important thing by far was timing. They even invented a specific word for it: _kairos_. Defined by the dictionary as “the perfect, critical or opportune moment”. The Geoffrey Howe resignation speech which destroyed Margaret Thatcher’s political career precisely 30 years ago last week had kairos by the bucketload. But then it needed to. Delivery was never Howe’s strong point. As his political rival Denis Healey famously noted, an attack from Geoffrey was like “being savaged by a dead sheep”. Without the all-important kairos, the speech would have languished in the footnotes rather than being hailed by the editor of _Hansard_ in 2015 as the greatest parliamentary speech of all time. Continue reading...
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