A good speech can talk a country into anything

Every so often a plan arrives that everyone agrees is bold, urgent and obviously right. The room fills with confident voices. Nobody is quite sure who checked it. That is the moment worth being frightened of, and there is a very old story about why.

In 415 BC the Athenians voted to send their finest fleet across the sea to attack Sicily. They were rich, they were at peace, and they had just signed a treaty. One young man wanted the war and argued for it brilliantly. An older general said it was a mistake. The assembly listened to both and chose the adventure - and then put the man who had argued against it in charge of carrying it out.

It came apart the way these things usually do, not through the enemy but through the people who launched it. The man who had sold the war was called home before the fighting started. He ran to Sparta instead, and Sparta armed the other side. The siege stalled. When there was still a way out, the commander waited, because the moon went dark and he took it as a sign. By the time he moved, the way out had closed. The fleet was destroyed in the harbour.

Now the fair objection, and it is a real one. Being open to a bold voice is the point of a free country, not a fault in it. A committee of careful men would have said no to every good idea as well as every bad one, and a democracy can at least throw out the people who got it wrong.

True. But look at when the learning arrives. Athens did correct itself. It corrected itself after the ships were gone and the men were dead. Learning from a disaster is not the same thing as avoiding one.

The trouble was never that Athens could be talked round. It was that nothing stood between being talked round and setting sail. No pause. No second vote. Nobody in the corner allowed to ask what it would cost and be taken seriously.

We are worse at this now, not better. The room is millions of people wide and it moves in hours, and it still pays out for the same thing: the confident pitch with nobody named as the loser, over the honest plan that admits a price. The things that slow a decision down are not the enemies of a free country. They are the only things that have ever stopped one voting for its own Sicily.

A free people is not undone by the voice that flatters it. It is undone the day there is nobody left who can make that voice wait.

An opinion of the house.