Before I created Mindful Presenter, I didn’t pay too much attention to British Prime Ministers’ conference speeches. They all sounded much the same to me, and I would drift off after a few minutes. Since then, I have made a conscious effort to be more patient and to study them closely, purely for what they can teach us about public speaking, whatever the politics.
Andy Burnham’s speech in Liverpool on Tuesday 29 September, his first conference speech as Prime Minister, was very different, and it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t say it is one of the best I have ever heard from a British Prime Minister. Rather than drifting off, I was captivated by every word, right up to the very end.
I didn’t have to translate
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I didn’t have to translate, interpret or read between the lines to understand what he was saying, why he was saying it and why it mattered. It didn’t feel like listening to a spokesperson. It felt like listening to a man who understood what was going on, cared about what he saw and spoke with real conviction about doing something about it, in the kind of ordinary human language everyone can relate to, rather than someone out to impress or score points.
I want to be clear that this is not a piece about his politics. You may agree with all of his plans, some of them or none of them, and it makes no difference to what follows, because what interests me is why this speech worked as communication, and what any leader can take from it into their next presentation, team meeting or pitch.
Please make me feel something
The essence of mindful presenting is a simple, silent request I believe every audience makes of every speaker: please make me feel something.
It happens in three stages. First, we must understand. Then we must feel enough to care, and then we have to see the future and feel the possibilities and opportunities it holds.
By the time he finished, I felt that he understood me, had heard me and saw me. I felt humbled, emotional, excited, hopeful and inspired. I went back through the full transcript, which the Labour Party has published, to work out how he did it, one stage at a time.
1. First, I understood
He didn’t open with policy. He took the hall back to the docks a short distance from where they were sitting, where his grandfather drove a lorry for Tate & Lyle, and to his gran, Kitty, who walked three miles out of the bombed city after the war to put down a deposit on a house. It was the house where he was born, and the one he credits with changing his family’s fortunes.
That’s how the entire speech is made.
Alongside the familiar language of new paths and national renewal, which is perfectly sensible and almost impossible to picture, he kept giving us things we could see. VAT coming off electricity bills that Thursday. A £2 cap on any single bus fare in England throughout 2027. When he explained why water and energy belong under public control, he referenced an observation someone had recently made to him: that Monopoly never lets you build on the Water Works or the Electric Company, an image that does in one sentence what a page of economic argument would struggle to do.
Abstract language asks an audience to do the work of imagining for themselves, and when they have to work that hard, many of us simply stop listening. Specific language does the work for them, which is why I never once had to translate.
When you prepare your next presentation, go through it looking for words like transformation, renewal, journey and excellence, and ask yourself what you would actually see if you were standing in the room where that word came true. Then say that instead.
2. Then I cared
Plenty of speakers would have left Kitty at the start, a warm piece of colour to bring the audience on side before the serious business began. He brought her back twice. When he turned to housing, he told the hall that the journey would start where he had started, with that house. Much later, when he reached social care, he described what he had seen when Kitty went through the care system in his early years as an MP, and the pain it caused his mother: her engagement ring was torn from her finger and stolen in a care home. Then the savings she had built up over a lifetime, which began with that same house, were all taken to pay for her care, care he said did not deserve the name.
By the time he announced a National Care Service, he hardly needed to argue for it. He had already shown us what its absence costs, through a woman we had met at the very start of the speech and had come to admire. The house that opened the speech as a symbol of hope came back as a picture of loss, and I think that is the most skilful piece of construction in the whole speech.
Then he did something I rarely hear a leader do.
Having described the people who looked after his father, low-paid yet, as he described them, skilful, funny and deeply humane, he stopped talking about care workers and addressed them directly.
He told them they were not invisible to him, that he saw them and was grateful to them, and that he was sorry his profession had let theirs down for so long. Then he did the same for NHS staff. It takes up only a handful of lines on the page, and it changes everything around it, because for that moment the speech stops being a performance for the hall and becomes a conversation with people beyond the hall.
What made me care most, though, was that his honesty cost him something. He told pensioners that the triple lock would be adjusted from April 2030, accepting that he might pay a political price for the difficult parts of his plan. He described his own generation of politicians, himself included, as having been too cowardly to fix something as basic as the care we give one another. He said the growing number of young people on benefits was not their fault, but politicians’. Whatever you think of those positions, each one handed someone a reason to be angry with him, and that is precisely why they sound true.
I am not going to pretend this is easy. When I coach leaders through an important presentation, they often have a sentence they are tempted to leave out because it is awkward, unpopular, or simply exposing, and it takes real courage to keep it in. The way I help people find that courage is to write the sentence down, say it out loud to someone they trust before they ever say it to a room, and notice that the world does not end. The reward is worth it, because the moment you say the difficult thing plainly, the people listening stop waiting for the catch and start listening to you.
3. Then I could see the future
A speech that only makes us understand and care leaves us moved but stuck. What lifted this one, for me, is that almost every part of it ended with something you could picture actually happening: a bill that week, a bus fare from January, care that would no longer cost people their homes, water and energy run for the people who rely on them. He then set the moment alongside the other times in the last eighty years when, under Labour governments, he said Britain had rediscovered a sense of hope, and asked us to see this as the next one.
The most personal part of that future came near the end.
He told the hall that on the day his father died, the Scottish First Minister had said he would be the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was careful, saying he was not repeating it for sympathy or to criticise John Swinney, who he did not think had known the news, and that his father would have defended Swinney’s right to say it. He used it instead to explain the determination it gave him to prove the remark wrong, and followed it with the image of the son of a man who had failed his eleven-plus becoming Prime Minister.
Then came the request. He told people watching at home that they might disagree with some or all of what he had said, and asked those who agreed with enough of it to get behind the plan. Asking an audience for total agreement invites every listener to search for the one thing they object to. Asking for enough gives people permission to step into the future with you while still holding on to their reservations, which, in my experience, is how people really change their minds.
4. How he said it
From a more technical public speaking perspective, his verbal and non-verbal delivery was completely congruent with his words, conviction, and belief. He was expressive in his voice, his face, his hands and his whole body. His pace was right, his pauses were beautiful, and he had enormous vocal variety, with real contrast in pitch, pace, tone, volume and energy.
He also did the one thing I have been urging leaders to do for many years: ditch the lectern. He moved, owned the platform completely, and spoke openly, honestly, and from the heart. A lectern gives a speaker somewhere to hide, and when you take it away, there is nothing between you and the people you are speaking to, which is frightening and is exactly the point.
Two details from the reports of people in the hall stay with me.
His aides said that about a quarter of the speech was ad-libbed, which may explain why so much of it sounded like conversation rather than a script. When he came to his father, he paused for more than thirty seconds to compose himself before he could carry on. Many of the people I coach would be terrified of a silence a tenth that long, and yet that pause said more about what he felt than any sentence could have.
5. The one thing I would change, and what others saw
If I had been coaching him, I would have taken out one habit. Early on he told the hall, “I am going to give you a real speech,” and he came back to the idea at least four more times, describing it as a very different conference speech, introducing his comments on Brexit as being in the spirit of the speech’s honesty, reminding the hall he had warned them it would be different, and finally telling viewers he had given them honesty, ideas and a clear direction. He didn’t need to tell us. The audience judges whether a speech is honest, and the care workers moment and the triple lock had already made the case far better than any description could.
Not everyone experienced the speech the way I did.
One review on the Debate Desk newsletter praised it highly but felt it needed more relaxed passages to give the audience relief from its intensity. I did not feel that, perhaps because he kept giving us moments of lightness, from a joke at his Chancellor’s expense in his very first story to admitting he could never get through a conference speech without mentioning buses, but it is a fair reminder that the same delivery lands differently with different people. Some critics questioned whether a Prime Minister should show emotion at all, and one opponent questioned his authenticity altogether. That is the risk every speaker takes the moment they let an audience see what they feel, and the only protection I know of is what he relied on: the feeling has to be real, and the words around it have to be honest.
What this means the next time you stand up
You do not need a conference hall or a country to learn from this speech. Before your next important presentation, ask yourself three questions. Will they understand me without having to translate anything? Will they feel enough to care? Will they be able to see the future I am asking them to step into?
Then find the sentence that might cost you something, carry it on a real person or a real detail rather than an abstraction, step out from behind whatever you usually hide behind, and trust your audience to recognise honesty without being told that is what they are hearing.
If you would like help finding the clarity and the courage to speak like that, I would love to work with you, whether through one of our public speaking courses, one-to-one coaching, or presentation skills training for your team.
If this has given you something to think about, please share it with someone who has an important speech or presentation ahead of them.
