Political speeches are important – they make or break careers and (can) define political careers.
Political speeches can catapult your career or sink it. Some political speeches can define whole careers. David Cameron’s speech in Blackpool got him the leadership of the Conservative Party. Obama’s speeches took him to The White House. Closer to home, when trying to selected for a constituency, delivering a good speech can be a deal breaker.
Commentators are often the real audience in political speeches.
Very few real people actually listen to a whole speech these days. The biggest live audience a politician usually ever has for a speech is often a leadership bid where maybe a few thousand supporters – the amateur commentators – will listen to all those carefully polished gems. In a leadership bid speech politicians are trying to turn the audience of a few thousand real people into salespeople who will go back to their constituencies and report on the speech – and the politician – good/bad, boring/inspiring, in/out, like/dislike.
But the far bigger task is to sway the professional commentators – the press. How they report your political speech soon becomes established fact. I often speak to my clients about “Perception is reality” – and what commentators say is very soon seen as the reality by hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers or TV viewers.
Professional commentators are (rightly) cynical fact-checkers who are constantly asked to make predictions, hate being proven wrong – but they also need to report and have great pressure from deadlines. They also need headlines. Think about this when writing or delivering a speech.
Soundbites matter in political speeches – whether you like it or not.
Soundbites count. They define a speech – and they need to survive intact without the context. Or at least be only slightly battered in the retelling. “One Nation” is all that most people will know of Ed Miliband’s speech last week at the Labour conference.
“Big Society” had ‘mixed reviews’ – what will David Cameron’s speech be distilled down to tomorrow?
More on political speeches and speech writing coming soon… sign up for my RSS feeds if this is your thing. I am off to conference again – day 3. Well – after breakfast anyway!
