Being a speech-writer for a leading politician is not an easy job.

I did it for two years, as the FCO official speech-writer for then Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey (now Lord) Howe.

Sir Geoffrey set a high standard. He insisted on his texts offering the maximum amount of meaning and unrelenting logic condensed down into as few words as possible. He was always on the look-out for pointing up what he called ‘paradoxes’ – areas of life and philosophy where we all wanted to have our cake and eat it.

All that was fine; impossible to imagine better writing training discipline than working to and fro over important draft texts to get them Just Right.

But there was one frustration. A speech-writer wants to see his/her brilliant words getting wide coverage. Alas for me, Sir Geoffrey was the far opposite of a contemporary political spinner. Rather than get something which was 98% fine out to the media in summary form, he would want to tweak the language just one more time himself to get it perfect.

So deadlines and headlines were missed. And plenty of my (and his) more vivid, memorable lines went down well enough on the day but otherwise evaporated.

We did do well with a major speech on Food Policy in April 1986, an attempt to summarise in a light but significant way some of the policy dilemmas arising from food subsidy programmes in different parts of the world.

Working on this production I mulled over the bizarre fact that at the time (mid-1980s) we in the West were spending huge sums in the ‘arms race’ with the Soviet Union, while simultaneously subsidising the Soviet Union’s ability to produce weapons through cheap EU farm exports of ‘surplus’ food produced by the CAP.

I came up with a phrase to address this folly which sounded rather snappy, even if it did not mean much: the Diet of Detente.

Sir Geoffrey did not like it: "But what does it mean?" I said that it meant nothing in particular, but it could make a good sound-bite and catch popular attention. In successive drafts he kept deleting it, I kept slipping it back in.

Finally it survived, and of course was picked up by the papers the following day – this was one speech which made it to the media for their deadlines and went down well.

Similar to-ing and fro-ing goes on with all speech-writers. One of the greatest speeches of our times was delivered by Ronald Reagan in June 1987 at the Brandenburg Gate beside the Berlin Wall: "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

And here is where it came from, a supreme yet moving moment of moral and political leadership, surviving the attempts by different US bureacracies to strike it from the text for being … naive, clumsy and provocative.

Sir Geoffrey Howe’s most famous speech of course was his resignation statement in the House of Commons in November 1990. It helped bring down Margaret Thatcher. 

His own work. Don’t blame me.