Christopher Silvester

Don't assume all the politicians' best lines are their own. Increasingly professional speech-writers have a key place at the heart of government.

In a Sunday Supplement series in May and June 2003, the author Christopher Silvester looked behind the scenes to find out the secrets about their trade.

Former speech writers for Tony Blair and George W. Bush are among those who offer their insights, along with former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Portillo and former cabinet secretary Lord Butler.

Click here to listen to Strictly Speaking - part one

Click here to listen to Strictly Speaking - part two

Click here to listen to Strictly Speaking - part three

Click here to listen to Strictly Speaking - part four

So how do you find yourself writing speeches for ministers? What skills do you need? Can you really teach them? There are different types of speech-writers: the party political knockabout stuff is written by special advisers who work for ministers, or by party officials; the less partisan material reflecting the departmental work of ministers is prepared by career civil servants.

Sean Lusk

Sean Lusk and Christopher Jary are lecturers at the Civil Service College at Ascot in Berkshire, which trains civil servants who work for government departments and agencies. They run courses on speech-writing and here explain how it is done.

Take a handful of middle-ranking civil servants, men and women aged between 24 and 60, from all sorts of departments. Add a manager or two from perhaps a major bank or a public company. Show them what a speech is for: sometimes to inspire, often to persuade but always to entertain. Show them what a speech is not for: to communicate detailed, abstract or complex information.

Teach them, with lots of examples, a few rhetorical devices - repetition, variation, alliteration, contrast, lists of three, puzzles and solutions, imagery and metaphor. Remind the civil servants that, although we often write for ministers, we never write party political speeches. (These are the province of ministers and special advisers.)

The Civil Service College at Ascot

Persuade them to have mercy on their audiences by being brief and entertaining - to concentrate on what's interesting and to pitch the content at the right level. Encourage them to relax, forget their official selves and take risks. And then let them write. Let them hear the speeches to discuss what worked, what didn't, and why. Then let them have another go and listen again.

And what happens? Almost all find they can produce the Good-Enough Speech that's appropriate to the occasion and the speaker, that will hold people's interest and put across its message clearly and simply. But with about half of them, something magical happens. Writing has unleashed a creativity often they didn't know they had. They excel.

Large organisations need creative employees, but their systems and culture often crush that creativity out of them. Our speechwriting course helps awaken that dormant creativity. It comes out in their speeches, or in other ways, but the reassuring thing is that it's there in so many of us, and it will come out.