It was a campaign in which party leaders struggled to win the trust of voters. Fractious and fact-averse, what was said and how may have mattered less than what voters chose to hear

It was a campaign in which party leaders struggled to win the trust of voters. Fractious and fact-averse, what was said and how may have mattered less than what voters chose to hear

Polls show that huge numbers of voters regarded both main party leaders in the 2019 election as unspeakably bad. But, though their speeches provoked a similarly derisive response, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn were strikingly different in the way they spoke – sub-Churchillian bluster on the one hand, murmured terseness on the other.

With starkly varying styles of oratory also offered by leaders of the smaller parties – including Jo Swinson for the Liberal Democrats, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, Arlene Foster of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Adam Price of Plaid Cymru – this was an election in which it is unusually instructive to look not just at what the politicians said, but how they said it.

The qualities that Johnson admirers regu­larly cite include his supposed oratorical skills. Yet even his better performances in the House of Commons have been blatant impersonations of his hero (and one-time biographical subject) Winston Churchill, while the worst have displayed the fluff and flannel of someone who had either not found time to write anything in advance or who had made notes but then found them impossible to decipher. It is the latter register that was apparent in most of his set-piece speeches during the election campaign.

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