IT WAS announced in March that the University of Huddersfield, in conjunction with the estate of the late J B Priestley, is launching a new public lecture series.

The organisers said they would be delivered by “a leading writer of international renown … [and] following in the tradition of Priestley himself, the authors giving these lectures will be selected not only for their literary stature but for finding new ways of engaging the public with their writing, as Priestley did with his broadcasting and theatre, and for making literature a vehicle for social and political comment.”

After the mindless soundbites peddled out by politicians of all hues during this election, we should welcome thoughtful discourse and public speaking which treats its listeners with intelligence.

Priestley’s mastery of the English language did not just entertain through novels such as The Good Companions or plays such as An Inspector Calls.

No — when his country needed him in the darkest days of WWII he gathered the strength contained within his fountain pen and earned a special place in the heart of the public with a series of Roosevelt-style fireside chats.

He was given a platform by the BBC to speak gently across the air waves on topics of his choice. In the Postscript series he mixed observations of the daily life of a country at war with an easy-to-understand vision of what the future might hold — and like US journalists Ernie Pyle and John Steinbeck, who told their public of the reality of of the war in Europe, he stiffened people’s resolve.

You can access a couple of Priestley’s Postscripts online. The BBC has recordings in its archives and they are now available on their website.

These lectures, written in trying circumstances as bombs were dropped from above, are things of beauty.

You can hear him talk of Dunkirk. On June 5 1940, his descriptions of the little ships are a masterful piece of rhetoric, speaking of how pleasure craft, more used to chugging their trade alongside the “sandcastles, ham and egg teas, palmists, automatic machines and crowded sweating promenades” had gone to face the hell of the nazi war machine, and many did not make it back.

He spoke of the Gracie Fields, a steamer he had taken to his home in the Isle of Wight.

He would describe a family of ducks he had seen at Whitestone Pond in Hampstead, “minute ducklings, just squeaking specks of yellow fluff…” which he founds inspiring, and in the same talk, revealed how he had watched Churchill in the Commons describe the difficult decision to sink the French fleet to stop it falling into nazi hands — and, at the same time, give Nye Bevin a playful elbow in the ribs.

He ended the broadcast with another of his memorable vignettes of everyday life: the story of a woman who owned a cafe in Liverpool, who accepted hat bands from French fleet sailors in lieu of payment for cakes, to the delight of the customers. Not good military discipline, but fun. “If a hundredth part of the goodwill and sense shown at the little cafe round the corner were imported into our international affairs … then all these chest-thumping screaming lunatics, and all their insane paraphernalia of destruction, would vanish.”

He described joining the Home Guard on the Isle of Wight, where he quoted Thomas Hardy and spoke of how Britain had been threatened before but always came out alright.

“There we were, ploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk, turning out at night, as our forefathers had often done before us, to keep watch and ward over the sleeping English hills and fields and homesteads.”

For Priestley was all about summing up shared experiences, be it his gentle descriptions of the nation in his book English Journey to the Postscript where he described his memory of the first day of the war, where he described Paddington Station as looking like it “had had six consecutive Bank Holidays, and reeked of weary humanity, thick with wastepaper, half-eaten buns and empty bottles.”

He made many more, though his war work nearly killed him — he had taken a room at the Langley Hotel opposite Broadcasting House in Portland Place. One night he was asked to stay on and record a piece to be broadcast to the dominions, which he dutifully did. As he sat there speaking carefully into a microphone, a bomb landed on the hotel opposite, reducing his bedroom, where he should have been sleeping, to rubble.

He was accused by the right-wing press of promoting socialism over the airwaves (accusations made by the same newspapers who had happily backed fascism, right up until the invasion of Poland).

In fact, he was rallying the man in the street, explaining clearly why they must not give up, reminding the nation that the war was a just cause and what would follow the victory his listeners were responsible for winning was a better world for all. But he did it in a language grounded in truth, a universal truth that his detractors could only nibble at in a way that made them sound ridiculous.

Priestley’s masterful communication shows how politics should be about creating an image of a perfect world and then drawing a route map of suggestions as to how to get there.

We deserve a bit more Priestley-like rhetoric coming from the mouths of those who want our vote. With just under a week of this election to go, such language has been lacking on the campaign stump, and our democracy is much the poorer for it.