With these increasingly ignorant politicians as cooks, it's no wonder that we're in the soup

By Nigel Jones for the Daily Mail

Published: 17:45 GMT, 2 August 2012 | Updated: 09:53 GMT, 3 August 2012

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Critic: Gore Vidal was scathing about the intellectual capability of modern US politicians

Gore Vidal, the acid-tongued American writer and wit who died this week put it well in his usual waspish way.

Speaking of modern US politicians he said: 'They no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they cannot read them either'.

Where Abraham Lincoln jotted down the immortal words of the Gettysburg address while listening to the interminable speaker who preceded him, Vidal's contemporary President John Kennedy confessed after delivering a keynote speech on agriculture to American farmers that he had not understood a word of what he had been saying. And the book that won JFK a Pulitzer Prize and his first recognition, 'Profiles in Courage', was ghosted for him by Theodore Sorensen, a hero-worshipping Kennedy groupie historian who also wrote Kennedy's speeches. And things have got a whole lot worse since JFK's heyday.

Nor is this increasing idle ignorance confined to American politicians.

Dumb stupidity is the hallmark of our dear leaders on this side of the pond too. Probably our last truly literate leading politician was Roy Jenkins, the son of a Welsh miner who had the airs and graces of a Duke, and wrote elegantly crafted works of political biography. Another Labour politician, Tony Benn, churned out endless Pooterish journals - as did, from either end of the political spectrum, Alan Clark and Chris Mullin - but these gossipy 'Dear Diaries', however entertaining, are hardly great works of political history or literature.

Literate: Roy Jenkins had the airs and graces of a Duke, although he was actually the son of a Welsh miner

Edward Heath, the treacherous pseudo-Tory who conned Britain into the EU, did write books it is true. But they were typically ego-maniacal works in praise of his own (highly questionable) skills as an amateur yachtsman and orchestral conductor. Even so, the illiteracy of our current breed of politicians makes Edward Heath look like the great historian Edward Gibbon by comparison. But what else can be expected of wonks with no experience of the world outside the Westminster bubble, who have, like Cameron and Miliband, moved seamlessly from university to political research, to a safe seat and so onto the green benches and (if they are lucky) the black limousines and the red Ministerial boxes.

Alan Clark wrote entertaining, albeit gosspiy, diaries, while Edward Heath should be credited for writing his own books

It is taken as a matter of course that when a newspaper features an article 'by...some politician ' the statesperson concerned will not have scribbled a word of it.  We are in fact conniving in their lies. And the same applies to their 'speeches'. At most they will have cast a languid eye over what some lowly minion  - or team of lowly minions - have laboriously knocked out. The collection of cliches and tired, trite empty phrases that passes for political discourse these days will be the result of several meetings of civil servants and SPADS, probably been run past a Focus Group and finally been signed off by the politician whose name will fraudulently appear above it or who will deliver his honeyed words from the speakers' podium. It will certainly be a case of too many cooks spoiling the tepid broth, and will certainly not resemble the polished oratory of a Demosthenes. a  Cicero, a Pitt or a Churchill.

Achievement: Winston Churchill churned out multi-volume works of biography and history

But, as historian David Starkey demonstrates in his current Channel 4 series 'The Churchills', things were very different in Winston's day. In his study of Churchill as a historian, Starkey shows the great man in his wilderness years churning out not only thousands of words of his own journalism, but huge, multi-volume works of biography and history - which after the war won him a Nobel Prize for Literature. It's true that he employed a team of bright young historians as researchers, but the end product, with its peerless prose, was indisputably his.

But even if they are too busy tweeting and appearing on witless TV shows to research and write history, you might hope that the politicians of today would at least read it. Instead, they make a virtue of their profound and shaming ignorance.

Anyone with even the sketchiest knowledge of Middle Eastern history would not have invaded Iraq, as Bush and Blair did. And David Cameron's apparent belief that we were playing second fiddle to the US in 1940, when Britain was actually standing alone against the Nazis demonstrates that while he may hold a degree in PPE (Oxford's equivalent of Media Studies) - his historical knowledge is  woefully lacking. The same goes for his sidekick George Osborne's 'Teach Yourself Economics' (yet still get it wrong) - grasp of the financial abyss we are staring into.

Lessons: If modern politicians aren't going to write history, they could at least read it

As they pack for the summer beaches and Tuscany pools, let me implore our leaders to find room in their wheelies for a new slim volume from their colleague Daniel Hannan. 'Unhappy Marriage: Britain & Europe (Notting Hill Editions).

In a little over 100 devastating pages they would learn why the EU is a fundamentally flawed project, why the Euro is doomed and why Britain has no future in such a corrupt and undemocratic body. For the new breed of political, economic and historical illiterates that would at least be a start.

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