How has politics lost its rhetorical elan? That is what Mark Thompson, formerly the director-general of the BBC and currently President and CEO of the New York Times Company, asks in the finest book on political culture I read this year. Enough Said: What's Gone Wrong with the Language of Politics? (St Martin's Press, $ 27.99, 342 pages) could be a book-length, anecdotal, rhetorical variation of Orwell's seminal essay written 70 years ago. In the concluding paragraph of Politics and the English Language, Orwell wrote: 'Political language—and with variations that is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase— some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs.' There is no redemption in politics as long as the language of politicians is an overused weapon of lies and evasions, even if we allow a certain amount of elegant exaggeration. Amplification has been part of rhetoric since Cicero, but, as Orwell, and now Thompson, says, no jargon please. The persuasive power of rhetoric is still achieved by the fine balance between argument (logos), character (ethos) and mood (pathos), but this Aristotelian guidance has no value for a political class empowered by clichés and platitudes. 'Argument without character is lifeless. The crowd drifts away. Character without argument is dangerous. Who can tell what that spellbinding figure will actually do if those cheers are ever parlayed into real power? Ignore the mood of your audience and it'll ignore you right back. Make it your lodestone and you risk sailing yourself and them straight into the rocks,' writes Thompson.

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