The Right Way: Top of the News

Wednesday, December 31, 2025

Top of the News

In the northeast corner of London’s Hyde Park, near the Marble Arch, is an area long known as Speaker’s Corner. Tradition holds that anyone is free to speak there on any subject for as much time as he pleases, “as long as the police consider their speeches lawful.” Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin would sometimes peddle their poisonous rhetoric there and yet go unmolested by the authorities, though in recent times the police seem to have drawn the “unlawful” line at anything uttered by a native Briton that offends the delicate sensibilities of Muhammadan immigrants.

Before this turn to sectarian division, passersby in Speaker’s Corner might have been drawn to any number of orators holding forth on any number of subjects. In his 1922 short story “Comrade Bingo,” P.G. Wodehouse described Speaker’s Corner as a place “where weird birds of every description collect on Sunday afternoons and stand on soap-boxes and make speeches.” Sometimes one of those birds may have spoken so compellingly as to draw a crowd, at least for a time, with the truly mesmerized drawing ever closer while others, less captivated by the delivery, remained on the fringes.

Encouraged by his enveloping circle of admirers, a speaker might begin to test the limits of credibility, making claims that, to those most devoted to him sound plausible, but to others ring as lunacy. To the speaker’s eye, surrounded as he is by ardent followers clapping and nodding and amen-ing along, the crowd remains as large and committed as ever, as the cheers and applause generated by the inner circle conceals the fact that people beyond are drifting away while commenting that the speaker is a very weird bird indeed.