Arguments are extraordinary things.
Painful things sometimes,
but fantastic ways of clarifying thought.
That could be arguing with your partner, arguing with a friend,
arguing in the law court, arguing in parliament.
But for me, at least, all these types of arguments
show where the truth is going wrong, helps you to think more clearly,
and in my case, helps me to change my mind.
A successful argument basically starts
with a really good grasp of the subject.
You need to choose your subject well.
Secondly, structure.
It needs a very clear beginning, middle and end.
Thirdly, the content of it, the words, the phrases,
the metaphors, the jokes, the things that give it life.
And finally, emotion.
And the way in which that's carried out, not just in the words,
but in your voice and in the way that you move your body.
When I'm making a speech or I'm about to go into a formal public argument,
I firstly work out very clearly what the structure is.
What are the two points or five points that I'm trying to land?
Then I think very carefully about memorising the first line
and the last line, so that I can finish on a strong point.
And then I walk and practise.
Speak and practise. Speak and practise.
And sometimes it just flows. Sometimes it's magical.
And sometimes you find
that something you thought was going to be magical
has become all kind of tortured and contorted and too complicated.
And it's not really working.
Arguments go wrong in many, many different ways.
One of the main ways in which we go wrong
is that we just lose control of our words
and we lose control of our emotions.
Emotion is very, very dangerous in an argument.
It can really put people's backs up.
And really upset them.
And we feel, at a sort of animal level,
somebody’s emotion coming at us
and it can make us sort of shut down and no longer listen to the words.
But at the same time, emotion done properly
is really the only way to win an argument,
because nobody's just going to listen to words.
So the master in argument
is somebody who can perfectly calibrate
when to hold back and when to go for it.
The best argument I've probably ever won
was in the first leadership debate
when I was running against the other candidates
to be leader of the Conservative Party,
to be prime minister of Britain.
And I suddenly found, about halfway through the debate,
that I had the right type of comparison to use.
I suddenly remembered that I'd been trying to put three bin bags
into the rubbish bin at home.
And my wife said,
"You're never going to get these three huge bags of rubbish in."
And I was tempted, like Michael and like Dom to say "Believe in the bin",
"Believe in Britain" right? It's nonsense!
They're not going to get a different deal out of Europe,
we all know that.
They know it themselves.
I produced it and I won the audience round and I won the debate.
The worst argument I had in my life
was the second big TV debate I did
when I was running to be leader of the Conservative Party,
this was my big chance to prove that I could be prime minister.
And I thought I had the most killer argument.
And I was just going to say to Boris Johnson,
how are you going to get Brexit done by the 31st of October?
And I kept asking the question and nobody would answer.
And I got more and more wound up with myself.
And my whole body language kind of cramped up.
My voice became very contorted.
I took off my tie, very bizarrely, in the middle of this debate,
and I felt within about two paragraphs
I had managed to lose my entire vision for Britain.
Tonight you were a bit lacklustre, weren't you?
I didn’t find that format really worked for me,
and I’m going to have to learn how I flourish
in the strange format of alternative reality.
One of the great changes in the history of argument is, of course,
the arrival of television, because suddenly it's possible for people
to view politicians in particular in action.
And the great moment where this really came into prominence
was the TV debate between Kennedy and Nixon
about who was going to be president, and famously, Nixon won on radio.
His arguments were much more serious, much more thoughtful.
But Kennedy just glowed on television,
and that's what really won him the presidency.
I love arguing on Twitter.
There's something very, very satisfying
about the discipline of that word limit.
You get to put out your argument
and then somebody comes back and then you come back at them.
And I love the clarity of that.
It's a beautiful way of arguing,
which wasn't available to us until Twitter was around.
One of the things that's very difficult about argument
is that in the modern world,
we often see it as a very, very bad thing, arguing.
Sometimes it's seen as a very male thing, a very aggressive thing,
something that makes people unhappy.
It's almost a form of bullying.
But if you don't argue, it is very, very difficult to get to the truth.
If you just let everything slide, if nothing gets challenged,
if you don't try to really pin down what somebody's saying,
you get a very lazy form of thought.
And a lazy form of thought, in the end, is a version of lying.