MPs' poor public-speaking skills are bad for democracy

Lamentably few Members of today's Commons know how to seize and retain the attention of the House. They are politicians. Public speaking should be, to them, as important as a steady rifle grip is to an assassin or the ability to whip up a plate of scrambled egg is to a short-order chef. And yet this most basic of skills eludes many MPs. How feeble, and what a pity for our parliamentary democracy.

Gordon Brown's Cabinet contains some astonishingly bad speechifyers. If the two words 'Geoff' and 'Hoon' do not send you instantly to sleep, 'John Denham', 'Jacqui Smith', 'Alistair Darling' and 'Jim Murphy' soon will.

These ministers barely raise or lower their voices. Words plop from their lips at a deadly, predictable rhythm. Among the junior ministers, even more interesting personalities such as David Lammy, Phil Woolas and Vera Baird are disappointingly weak at the Despatch Box.

Those last three all have something to say and something to represent yet they sick up their ministerial statements without aplomb. It is as though they feel too embarrassed even to try. It is no wonder the electorate often does not bother to vote.

Generations of undergraduate politicians have benefited from their studenty jousts

One hesitates (though not long) to sound like an elitist but we might have a better standard of oratory from the green leather benches if more MPs had belonged to debating societies such as the Cambridge Union.

The Union, founded in 1815, is nowadays invariably seen as a fount of toffish arrogance, a place where white-tied Berties exercise their Adam's apples and - fnarr fnarr - score points of order off one another like fencing Osrics.

Like all stereotypes it is not entirely unjustified but it makes too blunt a point. A reasonably interesting history of the Union (Arena of Ambition – A History of the Cambridge Union, by Stephen Parkinson, Icon Books, £20) has just been written. It shows that past generations of undergraduate politicians benefited greatly from their studenty jousts. Those early attempts at building and conveying an argument, sometimes in the face of an over-refreshed throng, helped to create some of the big beasts of Westminster politics.

Michael Howard learned as a youngster that stinging