Anthony Eden - Character and Speaking Style

Character and Speaking Style

Anthony Eden always made a particularly cultured appearance, well-mannered and good-looking. This gave him huge popular support throughout his political life, but some contemporaries felt that he was merely a superficial person lacking any deeper convictions. That view was enforced by his very pragmatic approach to politics. Sir Oswald Mosley, for example, said that he never understood why Eden was so strongly pushed by the Tory party, while he felt that Eden's abilities were very much inferior to those of Harold Macmillan and Oliver Stanley. Also, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson regarded him as a quite old-fashioned amateur in politics typical of the British Establishment. However, recent biographies put more emphasis on Eden's achievements in foreign policy, and perceive him to have held deep convictions regarding world peace and security as well as a strong social conscience.

Eden was for all his abilities not a very effective public speaker. Too often in his career, for instance in the late 1930s, following his resignation from Chamberlain's government, his parliamentary performances disappointed many of his followers. Churchill once even commented on an Eden speech that the latter had used every cliché except "God is love". His inability to express himself clearly is often attributed to shyness and lack of self-confidence. Eden is known to have been much more direct in meeting with his secretaries and advisors than in Cabinet meetings and public speeches, sometimes tending to become enraged and behaving "like a child", only to regain his temper within a few minutes.

Read more about this topic:  Anthony Eden

Famous quotes containing the words character, speaking and/or style:

    Foolish, whenever you take the meanness and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into the obedient spiracle of your character and aims.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious or so insidious a lobby. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby.... I know that in this I am speaking for the members of the two houses, who would rejoice as much as I would to be released from this unbearable situation.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    I shall christen this style the Mandarin, since it is beloved by literary pundits, by those who would make the written word as unlike as possible to the spoken one. It is the style of all those writers whose tendency is to make their language convey more than they mean or more than they feel, it is the style of most artists and all humbugs.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)