sensation you experience when you have been whacked in a debate. As an undergraduate he appeared at the Cambridge Union opposite Richard Crossman.

Future Home Secretary Howard recalls that he made "a typically moderate Conservative, Bow Group-type speech" - which was duly shredded by Crossman. The Labour grandee used a repeated rhetorical device which mocked moderate Tories for caring about the poor "ALMOST as much as the Labour party does". Forty eight years on, Michael Howard recalls that "it completely ripped me apart".

Indeed, all Union speakers learn early the merit of repartee. Arianna Huffington (Stassinopoulos, as was), a star of the Union in the early 1970s, spoke alongside J.K. Galbraith on the motion "The Market is a Snare and a Delusion".

University debating is the best way of training for the cockpit of our democracy

They were up against the American conservative William F. Buckley. Galbraith made a poor speech and then bullied Stassinopoulos into making an intervention on the free-marketeer Buckley. Galbraith got her to say that some markets were too imperfect to be free. Buckley, sizing up his beautiful interjector's Hellenic curves, replied at once: "Well, Madam, I do not know what market YOU patronise..." Collapse of House into laughter, Huffington today saying that she can "still feel my cheeks burning as I sat down".

Today's best Commons performers employ the slightly arch style of the university debating parlours for the simple reason that it works. Of the younger ones, I'm thinking of the likes of Michael Gove, David Miliband, Chris Bryant. If only we had more of them.

There is a Tory called Bercow who rates himself a great orator but is in fact dreadful because he almost completely lacks wit. He does not have the self-mockery which is beaten into college debaters.

Unless you have a natural, electric talent like non-college boy George Galloway, or a lifetime's experience in the pulpit (Ian Paisley) or a suave, public-school charm (Blair, Cameron), university debating is the best way of training for the cockpit of our democracy.

Former Union members know to speak clearly, briskly, without just enough assertion but not too much pomposity, and to leaven it with wit. It's called "communicating" and it is an awful pity there are not more of them who can do it.

Now that elitism is so outre, however, and now that the appalling Edward Balls is wrecking Cambridge and Oxford Universities, it seems unlikely that ex-Union hacks will in future attain much prominence.