Zagazoo as a Best Man Speech

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I have a two-year-old son. We get through a lot of children’s books.

I’ve found them very enriching. Most of them use the same speechwriting techniques as I do: three part lists, metaphor and rhyme – because they’re designed to be read aloud.

Young men, eager to do a good best man speech, often send me their scripts. I keep an open mind, but I nearly always have to give a long sigh when I finish reading. They describe in tedious detail their life of adventures with the groom. Anecdotes go on for paragraphs.

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Gove, Johnson & Hannan: Drinking the Potion

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A few years ago, I discovered the Adam Curtis documentary The Living Dead, The Attic.

Mrs Thatcher’s former speechwriter Ronnie Millar features prominently in it.

Gove, Johnson, Hannan: I was a young Tory like them at university, and ihz6t explains to me the spell I got caught up in during the Thatcher years. It’s the mythology that they used in the Brexit campaign.

My work as a speechwriter has taught me why these ideas should be put in bottles and branded as harmful substances. I had hoped the referendum would condemn them to the oblivion they richly deserved. But I was wrong.

They have ‘subordinated reason to the heroic myth’. If you watch the Adam Curtis video, you’ll see, as Alan Clarke explains, they’ve ‘drunk the potion’.