Er, say that again, Prime Minister?

John Major won't go down as a soundbite genius. Giles Smith picks over the sayings of an anti-orator

Two weeks ago, John Major gathered some members of the press in the garden at Downing Street and declared, in a remark which converted directly into headlines the following morning and which has been repeated many times in the ensuing days: "It is time to put up or shut up." It was a startling moment. Not only was the leader of the Conservative Party standing down, he was doing so while using a memory-friendly phrase.

We are not used to this. In the age of the soundbite, our Prime Minister has continued almost heroically to offer up less easily digested verbal fare - rhetorical equivalents of the bowl of minestrone, the glass of warm water or (at best and if really pushed) the boiled sweet. If he goes under in this afternoon's leadership election, it may well be said by those looking back: words failed him.

Few other Prime Ministers can have contributed quite so little to the books of quotations. For what words or phrases will John Major be remembered? There's "the classless society", perhaps. And "back to basics" - though that was an original coinage, rather than an original phrase. And, er, that's it. More clearly, he will be recalled as the anti-orator. At the climax of a hectic Conservative Party conference in 1992, Mr Major got up in front of his people and said: "Well, it hasn't exactly been a dull week, has it?"

That sentence chimes perfectly with what we have come to recognise as the Major tone. Much of his public speaking has sounded like extracts from the conversation of a retired couple on a day out, sitting in a car overlooking the sea. A homeliness has informed his words, even when the context might have prompted him to fly high. He told his party in 1993: "We can no more stop fighting the battle against 'big government' than the gardener can stop mowing the lawn." When he spoke elsewhere of "the very marrow of Britain", it was possible, just fleetingly, to believe this was simply another gardening metaphor.

Not that Mr Major hasn't tried, just occasionally, for something more ambitious. Looking back over the big-moment speeches, you occasionally come across the ones that got away - phrases which, at the time he wrote them, he may well have imagined burrowing triumphantly into common usage, but which dropped tragically on first use.

In his speech to the party in 1993, he ran through a list of economic triumphs - productivity up, manufacturing up - and was clearly heading for some kind of clinching phrase, something to set the nation chattering: a "pound in your pocket" for the Nineties. "Madam Chairman," he announced. "It's the opportunity cocktail we've been wanting for years." Nobody waits years for a cocktail. Half an hour, maybe, but then you go to another bar. Not surprisingly, the opportunity cocktail was never on Mr Major's menu again. Nor on anyone else's.

Occasionally, his rhetoric has been hampered by straightforward clumsiness. "When you hear people saying this, that and the other," he once remarked, "don't always swallow it wholesale." Actually, you swallow things whole and buy them wholesale. On another occasion, he asked us to imagine a football opening a door: "The health service," he said, "is not a political football to be kicked around in the hope that, somehow or other, it will reopen the door of Downing Street to a Labour government." He once told the party: "Troubles come in bunches." Strictly speaking, flowers, grapes and bananas come in bunches. And so it goes on.

Evidently, we can be sure that a John Major speech is, very largely, his own work. A spokesman in the Downing Street press office said: "The Prime Minister writes his own speeches." No committees? No advisers? "He has advisers on all kinds of things, but we don't give those details out."

"Language most shows a man," Ben Jonson wrote. "Speak that I may see thee." When Major speaks, it is fair to assume we see Major.

This is all, of course, miles from the American way of doing things. In America, politicians call for the word-people to whoop it up on their behalf and wheel out the catchy phrases. Peggy Noonan (perhaps the most influential sentence-doctor in recent history) wrote a speech for Ronald Reagan that pictured the crew of the space shuttle Challenger "slipping the surly bonds of earth". She wrote another in which George Bush, campaigning for the presidency, gestured grandly to "a thousand points of light". Contrast the Prime Minister, speaking to the Constituency Chairmen Forum at Conservative Central Office recently, reaffirming, in the immediate wake of his resignation, a few of his core beliefs. "Sport is character- building," he told them. "Sport is part of a rounded way of life."

As a troubled orator, Mr Major is to some extent the victim of his policies. The politics of the centre-right don't lend themselves to spectacular business at the lectern in quite the same way as the politics of the far right - or, for that matter, of the far left. The thunder is heard at the extremes. Setting up in opposition to the Prime Minister, John Redwood only had to mention a royal boat to rouse the blood of his supporters. "Tories keep royal yachts, not scrap them," he said, which was grammatically impure and politically irrelevant but at least had the virtue of crispness.

Contrast the struggle of Mr Major to musicalise his concerns: "We must win the battles we care about. Lift our country back into growth." When the first battle you care about is an economic one, there can be no leaping up Mount Parnassus. Perhaps the best you can hope for is an uneasy alliance between the language of a DSS form and the marriage ceremony: "What families have worked a lifetime to create," Mr Major has said, "the taxman will not be allowed to destroy."

He could help himself, as others do, to literature, but literature has never figured prominently in the Prime Minister's public speaking. This may be because an elastic and scholarly allusiveness would not sit well with one of Mr Major's other key rhetorical devices: the claim of ordinariness. As he told the party conference in 1993 (and as he has told it, in some not entirely dissimilar form, every year since his ascent to the leadership): "I came from the backstreets of Brixton, Mr Chairman, and I've never forgotten it." "Siren voices" appear in Mr Major's speeches on more than one occasion - but they are always to be resisted.

In 1992, on one of Mr Major's rare excursions into the pages of a book, he mentioned Don Quixote, only to disparage him, in an interestingly narrowed version of the fable, as one who "read too many old books". We should be clear, though, that the flavour of this is distinct from the flaunted philistinism of Baroness Thatcher. For Mr Major, literature is all very well and grand and noble, and fine for those who like that sort of thing. But it takes place elsewhere.

Hence the awkwardness and strain in his speaking. As Mr Major once declared: "It is right to speak plainly and directly." He is a man compelled by the nature of his work to be a rhetorician, while beset by the feeling that rhetoric is itself to be mistrusted.

So a weird rhetorical hybrid sprouts, less than exciting on the ear but inadvertently revealing. Last month, ahead of his resignation, Mr Major told the Welsh Conservatives' conference: "We will not ride on an escalator that takes us where we do not want to go." This escalator image is worth pausing over, because it gives us an insight into what a political journey for Mr Major might be. It's not an adventure on which you run the risk of being forced into a crevasse or nudged into a pit. There is no sense here that politics is a world in which vertigo and reckless aggression from one's adversaries are a real possibility. The game is not even as treacherous as Snakes and Ladders. In this metaphor, politics is a department store or an airport, a place in which the worst that can happen is that you might find yourself heading off on the wrong escalator, which is always a bit of a pain, though frankly, one is never hugely inconvenienced when it happens.

The point is, Mr Major's escalator metaphor, like many of his metaphors, is honest about what politics, for the most part, feels like. It is probably fair to say that the business of the House, which is chiefly dull, earnest and chore-like, has more in common with moving stairways than with, say, abseiling. Maybe even Mr Major's severest critics would applaud him for resisting the Peggy Noonan-style illusion that somehow politics reaches gloriously to the heavens, and for refusing to dress himself in speech as some sort of big-muscled voyager or action hero. But it seems the act doesn't play - and, for better or worse, its time may be up.

Great speeches ... and Major's minor versions

On enemies: I'd much rather have that fellow inside my tent pissing out, than outside my tent pissing in - Lyndon Johnson on why he kept J Edgar Hoover at the FBI, 1971

With a low inflation rate, we can compete with the best in Europe. And I want to thank Norman Lamont for his courage in bringing that inflation rate down - John Major, to the Conservative party conference, Brighton, 1992

On war: The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime - Viscount Grey, on the eve of the First World War

Right across Europe now, in this critical hour, people are looking and listening to us and what we have to say - John Major, Brighton 1992

On ideals: I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain and the crooked places will be made straight - Martin Luther King, Washington, August 1963

Long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog-lovers ... Old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist - John Major, to the Conservative Group for Europe, April 1993

On service: I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over and I've seen the Promised Land - Martin Luther King, Memphis, Tennessee, April 1964

I see public service as a duty and if you can serve, I believe you have an obligation to do so - John Major, resignation speech, Downing Street, June 1995

On being tough: The world must be made safe for democracy - Woodrow Wilson on the US's decision to enter the First World War, 1917

New age travellers? Not in this age. Not in any age - John Major, Brighton conference, 1992

On youth: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - John F Kennedy, inaugural address, January 1961

We've heard some cracking speeches this week. From the right team. A young team - in fact the youngest Cabinet this century. A professional team - John Major, to Conservative party conference, Blackpool, 1991