Sir Alec Douglas home: Case study in rhetorical failure

Abstract

RHETORICAL critics usually analyze successful speeches and speakers. If success were a requirement for valid criticism, Sir Alec Douglas Home would certainly not be the subject for a critical essay. Even his close political friends would not classify him as a brilliant speaker. More likely they would agree with journalistic estimates that he has little rhetorical skill but possesses a certain amateurish charm that enhances his ethos with a friendly audience and tends to blunt the attacks of his political enemies. He himself decided that it was in the best interests of the Conservative Party that he step down as leader after a relatively short tenure, long before reaching the normal age of political retirement. An examination of his rhetoric during the decisive pre-campaign and campaign periods of 1964 may yield some useful insights about the rhetoric of failure. The analysis of these speeches revealed a man who lacked the qualities of leadership needed in a party spokesman. His rhetoric began without promise, improved through dogged effort—so long as audiences were friendly, and then disintegrated in futility as the hostile pressures of the hustings were brought to bear upon the speaker. Many of Home's addresses of this period, severely edited and abridged, were collected in a book issued as a campaign document under the title Peaceful Change. As will be seen in this analysis,