Since 2016, six people have walked up Downing Street to deliver the same speech.
Not the same words, of course. The same brief.
Same door, same job to do, same country that has heard it all before. Five of the six spoke from the lectern that gets carried out and set up in front of that famous black door. Andy Burnham didn’t. He walked up to a microphone and spoke without notes.
I’ll come back to that, because I’ve been asking for it for years.
This isn’t a political blog. It’s a look at six speeches from a public speaking perspective, and every line I quote is taken from the record of what was actually said.
What all six were trying to do
I can’t say that every Prime Minister in history has faced the same task on that step. I’ve read and watched six speeches, not fifty.
What I can tell you is that when you lay all six speeches side by side, they are all clearly attempting the same three things.
– To say what is actually wrong
– To say what they will do first
– To give you a reason to believe them this time
These are not six strangers. Four of them are Conservatives. Boris Johnson was Theresa May’s Foreign Secretary. Liz Truss served in both May’s government and Johnson’s. Rishi Sunak was Johnson’s Chancellor, and in his own first speech said the mandate his party won in 2019 was not the property of any one individual but belonged to all of them. Sir Keir Starmer and Andy Burnham are both Labour, one succeeding the other.
That makes what follows more interesting, not less. Six people, most of whom shared a party and in several cases a manifesto, produced six completely different answers to the same three questions. Shared politics did not produce shared speeches.
All six are clear enough about what they think is wrong. It is the other two questions that separate them, and they separate them dramatically. I’ll score all six against all three at the end.
Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, framed the stakes well in his analysis of Liz Truss’s first speech. He wrote that a new Prime Minister’s first address does more to shape and frame their premiership than anything they say before or after it.
Most of the business presentations I watch come unstuck in exactly the same place. They talk at length about what they intend to do, are vague about what is actually wrong, and never get round to explaining why anyone should believe them.
Here’s what each of the six did.
Theresa May, 13 July 2016 – talking to people, not about them
I wrote about her first speech at the time, and said it was a striking contrast to her campaign speech: more grounded, more intentional, more emotionally connected. Reading the full transcript again ten years on, I’d add something I missed then.
Most people remember two words from that speech: ‘burning injustice’. Almost nobody remembers that she said them once, in the singular, and tucked them into the middle of a sentence. Her government, she said, would fight against the burning injustice that, if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others.
That phrase is not what made the speech work. What she does next is.
What follows is a list of seven, and not one of them is an abstraction. If you’re born poor, you die nine years earlier. If you’re black, you are treated more harshly by the criminal justice system. If you’re a white working-class boy, you are less likely than anyone else in Britain to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you are less likely to reach the top professions. If you’re a woman, you will earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there is not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you will find it harder than ever to own your own home.
Read that list back and notice what it isn’t. It isn’t a list of policies. It is a list of people, and every one of them is addressed as “you”.
She does it twice more. The second time she turns to the families who are just about managing and describes their lives back to them, and there are no statistics in it at all. You have a job, but you don’t always have job security. You have your own home, but you worry about paying a mortgage.
Then a third run, this time on what her government would do. When we take the big calls, we’ll think not of the powerful, but you. When we pass new laws, we’ll listen not to the mighty, but to you. When it comes to taxes, we’ll prioritise not the wealthy, but you.
Three passages, one habit. In each of them she isn’t talking about people. She is talking to them.
It isn’t the policies from that speech that get quoted back. It’s the address.
One honest complication, though, and it matters for what follows. For all its force on what was wrong, that speech never says what she will do on Monday morning. Not one dated action, not one first step. It is the best answer of the six to the first question, and it barely attempts the second. Hold on to that.
Try this: if your audience appears in your talk as “the business”, “stakeholders” or “our people”, you haven’t addressed anyone at all. Rewrite one section in the second person and read it out loud. You’ll hear the difference immediately.
Here is the shift in practice. Somebody opening a talk about replacing a reporting system:
Before: “The business has experienced significant friction with the current process, and stakeholders have raised concerns around data visibility.”
After: “You spend Thursday evenings rebuilding a report you already sent once, and when somebody asks where a number came from, you can’t always tell them.”
The same problem, described twice. The first version is about a process. The second one is about the person sitting in front of you.
Boris Johnson, 24 July 2019 – the structure underneath the performance
First, a correction I’d like to make, because I’ve seen this repeated almost everywhere and I’d rather we got it right.
“Get Brexit Done” was not the centrepiece of this speech. The phrase does not appear in it at all. That came later, at the December 2019 election. On the step in July, the promise was that Britain would leave the EU on 31 October, no ifs or buts.
The moment everyone quotes is the run at his critics: the doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters. It’s the most memorable line in the speech and, for my money, the one that did the least work.
The work was done by something far more disciplined. Five times he opened a promise with the same four words: my job is to.
To serve you, the people. To make your streets safer. To make sure you don’t wait three weeks to see your GP. To protect you, your parents or your grandparents from the fear of selling a home to pay for care. To make sure your kids get a superb education.
Then a sixth turn on the same idea, phrased slightly differently: his job, he said, was to be Prime Minister of the whole United Kingdom.
That is the same device Theresa May used, turned around to point at solutions rather than problems.
There is one more thing in that transcript, and it is the part I keep coming back to.
Four of those promises came with a start attached, and the words he chose are worth noticing. Twenty thousand more police, and recruiting starts forthwith. Twenty hospital upgrades, and work starts this week. On social care, a plan he said he was announcing now, on the steps of Downing Street, and on schools, work that begins immediately behind that black door.
Forthwith. This week. Now. Immediately. Not one of them is a date in the future.
I’ve long argued that Boris Johnson is a better speaker than his critics allow. What I hadn’t seen until now is why so much of his structure gets missed. I had watched that speech. I had never read it.
Watching a speech teaches you about delivery. Reading one is the only way to see how it was built. The more compelling somebody is to watch, the more completely their charisma hides the scaffolding underneath it.
Try this: pick a speaker you admire and read their speech after watching them. Most well-known speeches have published transcripts, and captions will do for the rest. Look for two things: the same few words opening one sentence after another, and whether any promise has something attached to it that could happen this week.
Here is why that is worth an hour of your time. Watching a great speaker shows you their delivery, the timing, the presence, the warmth in the room. You can absolutely develop your own version of all of that, but you won’t get there by copying theirs, because it grew out of who they are. Structure is different. You can lift ‘my job is to’ straight off the page and use it on Tuesday morning, and nobody will know where you found it.
If you have ever watched somebody brilliant and come away thinking you could never do that, there is a decent chance you were studying the half you can’t copy.
Liz Truss, 6 September 2022 – correct in every particular
I’ve defended Liz Truss as a speaker before, at a time when a good deal of the commentary about her struck me as unnecessarily cruel. Having now read the whole thing rather than the clips, I’ll defend a good deal more of it.
It is a properly built speech. A tribute to her predecessor. An account of what is wrong that runs wider than people remember – severe global headwinds abroad, and at home the roads, the homes, the broadband, the burden on families. Three named priorities: the economy, energy and the NHS. A mechanism attached to them, including tax cuts and reform. A date on the most urgent of them, action that week on energy bills. A central image she builds properly, as strong as the storm may be, the British people are stronger.
That is more than most first speeches manage, and a good deal more than she is usually given credit for.
She also uses the same device as May and Johnson, and uses it more often than either of them. Eight times in that speech she introduces a commitment with the same two words.
I will take action this day. I will pursue three early priorities. I will get Britain working again. I will cut taxes. I will drive reform. I will deal hands on with the energy crisis. I will take action this week. I will make sure that people can get doctor’s appointments.
Eight times.
May’s repetition points at the listener: if you’re born poor, if you’re a woman, if you’re young. Johnson’s points at the job: my job is to. Truss’s points at herself.
That is the same technique doing an entirely different thing. A speech built on ‘I will’ is asking the room to take your word for it, and this speech never gives them a reason to. The closest it comes is the last line before thank you: I am determined to deliver.
Determination isn’t evidence. It is what you offer when you haven’t got any.
Forty-nine days after that speech, she was gone. I am not going to pretend a speech caused that. But she stood there needing people to believe her, and she built the whole thing on a promise that they already did.
The lesson isn’t that she should have been more emotional. There was feeling in that speech. It is that repetition amplifies whatever you point it at, and she pointed it at herself.
Try this: count the sentences in your next talk that begin with I or we, and the ones that begin with you. If the first list is longer, the talk is about you, and the room will feel it however good your intentions are. The fix is rarely more enthusiasm. It is turning three or four sentences round so that the person listening is the subject of them.
Rishi Sunak, 25 October 2022 – how to inherit a mess
Of the six, this is the speech I’d most want my clients to study, because most of us will at some point have to stand in front of a room and account for a failure we didn’t personally cause.
He did three things in sequence, and the sequence is the lesson.
He gave his predecessor credit for her intent before naming the failure; she was not wrong to want growth, he said; it is a noble aim, and he admired her restlessness. He named the failure without apportioning blame: some mistakes were made, not born of ill will or bad intention, quite the opposite in fact. Then he took ownership of the remedy, saying he had been elected in part to fix them.
Naming the failure without pinning it on anyone is where most people hide. “Mistakes were made” is the classic corporate evasion precisely because the sentence has no subject. What stops it being an evasion here is that he then owns the fix.
You are allowed to be vague about who broke it, so long as you are specific about who is fixing it.
Then came the line that carried the speech. Trust is earned, he said, and I will earn yours. He stated the principle, then immediately made himself the subject of it. That second half is what turns a proverb into a promise, and most people leave it off.
Try this: acknowledge, don’t apportion, own the fix. In that order. It works for an overrunning project, a restructure, a bad quarter or an inherited team.
Here is the difference it makes. You have taken over a team six months after a reorganisation that went badly, and you are speaking to them for the first time:
Before: “I know the last year has been difficult. I’ve inherited a number of issues that weren’t of my making, and decisions were taken before I arrived that I wouldn’t have taken. My job now is to steady the ship.”
After: “The reorganisation was worth attempting. It was trying to fix something that genuinely needed fixing, and I would have wanted to fix it too. It hasn’t worked. Three of you are covering two jobs, and the handover process is broken. That is what I am here to sort out, and I will tell you by Friday how.”
Every sentence in the first version is about the speaker’s position. Every sentence in the second is about the room’s problem. Only one of them mentions a day of the week.
Sir Keir Starmer, 5 July 2024 – the discipline of promising less
I reviewed this speech when he gave it, and I wasn’t kind about the delivery. I found it monotone and solemn, rather more like a minister giving a eulogy than a leader trying to galvanise a nation, and I said he was far too tied to his notes and the lectern.
I still think all of that, but reading the script now, I owe him something I didn’t give him then.
The delivery I complained about was exactly what the script called for.
He was the only one of the six to arrive straight from a general election victory, and he spent his best rhetorical moment lowering expectations rather than raising them. Changing a country, he said, is not like flicking a switch. This will take a while. He promised a calm and patient rebuilding, and an end to the era of noisy performance.
Deliberately spending your capital on cooling a room down takes nerve. In most business situations it is also exactly right, because the fastest way to lose a room is to promise a transformation on a timeline you don’t control.
So, he wrote a speech about lowering the temperature and then delivered it in a way that lowered the temperature. The two halves agreed completely. That is not a failure of craft. It is what congruence looks like.
It is also where it comes unstuck. Both halves were pulling in the same direction, and the direction was down. There was nothing anywhere in that speech generating any lift, not in the words, not in the voice. Calm words delivered calmly give you a coherent whole and a room with no heat in it.
He was out of office two years later. I am not going to hang that on a speech, but under-promising only protects you from one failure. It does nothing to build the belief that keeps people with you when things get hard, and if the delivery is as level as the message, that belief has nowhere at all to come from.
Try this: if you’re going to lower expectations, lower them about timing and raise them about direction. “This will take eighteen months, and here is exactly where we end up” is credible. “This will take a while, bear with us” isn’t.
Andy Burnham, 20 July 2026 – naming the objection before your audience does
This speech is only days old as I write, so what follows is a judgement about one short speech and nothing more.
Start with the staging, because he made a decision before he opened his mouth.
Two years ago, reviewing Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech, I wrote that he should free himself from his notes, let go of the lectern and speak more freely. Andy Burnham walked up to a microphone with neither.
The lectern is the visible piece of the institution. It carries the coat of arms, it holds your script, and it puts a solid object between you and everybody else. Removing it shortens the distance, which was the argument his whole speech was making. It also removes the safety net, and an audience can see that.
People read risk. Standing there with nothing to hold is a claim about how well you know your own material, and no sentence can make that claim on your behalf.
Before anybody copies him, one warning. Speaking without notes is not a decision you can take on the day. If you lose your place, there is nothing to go back to, and a room can always tell.
It only works when you have prepared to the point where the notes had stopped being useful to you anyway. That is the order it happens in, and it is the wrong way round in most people’s heads. You don’t put the notes down and hope the knowing follows. You prepare until you notice you have stopped looking at them, and then you leave them behind.
That is the staging. Now the speech itself.
He did something unusual. He opened on his own weakest point. Before anyone else could raise the obvious objection, another Prime Minister nobody voted for, he raised it himself, noting that he was the sixth person in ten years to walk up that street, and the seventh Prime Minister since 2016.
Then he went further and admitted collective failure. People were fed up with politics, he said. He had heard them. His side had not been good enough and needed to be better.
Having spent his opening explaining why he might not deserve a hearing, he then did the thing that brought it back. He named a single, small, checkable first action. He would go through the door behind him and issue his first instruction: to end rough sleeping.
If that move feels familiar, it should. It is close to what Boris Johnson did four times over in 2019, and Johnson reached for the same image, the work that begins immediately behind that black door.
Seven years apart, from opposing parties, two very different politicians reached for the same device. They did have one thing in common. Neither had won a general election. Both were standing there, having to explain why they were entitled to be there at all, and both answered the same way: not with an argument, but with a small act you could go and check.
It converts a speech from a description of the future into evidence about the present.
Burnham balanced it with a ten-year plan and cost-of-living measures promised for the following day, which is the other half of the technique. Something to check tomorrow, something to aim for over a decade.
One last thing, since I’ve written before about how much the word “we” matters. In 549 words, he used it seventeen times. Sir Keir Starmer used it sixteen times in a speech nearly a third longer, at 712 words. Burnham’s is noticeably the more collective of the two, and you can hear it.
Whether any of it holds is a question for a very different kind of article.
Try this: find your first instruction. What is the one small thing you’ll do the moment you step off the stage, that the room can watch happen? Say it out loud. It is worth more than the rest of your slides put together.
Do they all sound the same?
I’ve said before that if you were looking for a public speaking template for Prime Ministers, you’d find they all seem to follow it. Listen to the six of them back to back, and they do sound remarkably similar: the same cadence, the same register, the same careful gravity.
Having now read all six of these speeches word by word rather than simply listening to them, I’d put it more precisely.
They sound alike. They are not built alike.
Underneath a near-identical delivery style lie six very different architectures, and the differences between them are far more instructive than anything in the tone of voice.
How the six compare
Here is what happens when you set all six against the three questions each of them was trying to answer.
On what is wrong, every one of them makes a real attempt, and what separates them is evidence rather than effort. May names seven things and attaches a fact to each. Burnham names a cause and dates it: wrong turns taken in the 1980s, power centralised, industry lost, places that never recovered. Truss names plenty – global headwinds abroad, and roads, homes, broadband and the burden on families at home – and attaches evidence to none of it. Naming a problem and demonstrating it are not the same move.
On what they will do first, they don’t split into good and bad. They form a ladder. May never answers it at all. Sunak puts economic stability at the heart of his government, without saying what will happen on Monday. Starmer says the work of change begins immediately, then doesn’t say what comes first. Truss gets closer than either of them: tax cuts and reform as the mechanism, spades in the ground, and action that week on energy bills. What she doesn’t give you is a number. Johnson and Burnham are the only two who name something countable: twenty thousand police with recruiting starting forthwith, one instruction on rough sleeping issued the moment he walks through that door.
So the dividing line isn’t the promise of speed. Four of the six offer that in some form. It is whether anything is named that someone could actually go and check.
As for why you should believe them, three take the question on, and three leave it alone. Sunak is the most direct: trust is earned, and I will earn yours. Starmer says the lack of it can only be healed by actions rather than words. Burnham admits his own side has not been good enough. May barely raises it. Truss asserts that she will deliver, which is a promise rather than a reason. Johnson doesn’t take it on.
Now put the three together.
Only one of the six takes on all three questions, and it is Burnham. I would add the obvious caution there: his is the newest speech in this article and the easiest to over-rate on a few days’ evidence.
Every one of the other five leaves at least one question substantially unanswered, and the strongest are not spared. May writes the sharpest account of what is wrong of all six, and then answers neither of the others: no first step, and barely a word on why anyone should believe her. She is the only one to leave two of the three effectively untouched. Johnson names first steps you could go and check by the weekend, and offers almost nothing on why anyone should trust him to take them.
That is the collective lesson, and I think it is worth more than any of the individual ones. These are three separate jobs. Being outstanding at one of them does not cover the other two, and a room will feel the gap long before it can tell you what is missing.
It also explains something most of us have experienced from the audience side. You listen to somebody diagnose your problem better than you could have done it yourself, and you still walk out unconvinced. Nothing was wrong with what they said. Something was missing from what they didn’t.
That isn’t a political observation. It’s the same divide that separates a board presentation that gets funded from one that gets thanked.
There is one more pattern in the six, and it is the reason I work in the order I do.
Look at how delivery and content pair up. Starmer’s delivery was the flattest of the six, and his script was one of the better ones. Johnson was the most watchable, and his was the most tightly built. Truss delivered hers perfectly competently, and the structure underneath it was pointed at herself.
Across these six, how somebody sounds tells you very little about whether the thinking has been done.
That matters because of what people do when a talk goes badly. They go away and work on the delivery. More energy, better pausing, stronger eye contact, and sometimes that is the right answer. If what actually failed was the message, you can polish that talk for a fortnight, and it will still land as nothing, because there was never anything underneath it to carry.
That is why The Presenter’s Operating System™ puts Message first and Voice last. Not because delivery doesn’t matter; it plainly does, but because it is the last thing that should change, and it is almost always the first thing people reach for.
What to take from each of them
Purely as public speaking, and with no comment on anybody’s politics, here is the one thing I would lift from each:
– Theresa May – talk to people, not about them.
– Boris Johnson – attach something to every promise that starts this week.
– Liz Truss – repetition amplifies whatever you point it at.
– Rishi Sunak – acknowledge, don’t apportion, own the fix.
– Sir Keir Starmer – if you lower expectations about timing, raise them about direction.
– Andy Burnham – name the objection before the room does.
| Try this before your next talk
Write your opening on one page and answer these honestly. – In my first sixty seconds, have I named the problem in the words my audience would use about themselves, rather than the words my industry uses about them? – Have I said anything about the cause, or only the symptoms? – Is there one specific thing I’ll do immediately after this talk that this room can verify? – Have I raised the objection they’re already thinking, before they have to? – If one person repeated a single sentence of this to a colleague tomorrow, which sentence would it be, and did I write it on purpose? Any of those you can’t answer is the part that isn’t finished yet. Until they all have answers, you have a plan rather than a speech. |
And then the job starts
There’s a reason these short speeches outlive the governments that follow them. It isn’t eloquence. Most of them aren’t especially eloquent.
It’s that somebody stood in front of a sceptical audience and made a small number of things unmistakably clear. What they thought was wrong. What they were going to do about it first. Why they were the one to do it.
Everything else in public speaking is technique in the service of those three things.
Most of us will never stand outside Number 10. Most of us will stand in front of a room that has heard promises before and is deciding, in the first sixty seconds, whether to bother listening.
Same brief. Smaller doorstep.
Disclaimer: This article isn’t intended as a commentary on the rights or wrongs of the political stance of any of the leaders mentioned. It is solely a perspective on public speaking.
If you’d like to develop your public speaking and presentation skills
– Book yourself onto a powerful public speaking course.
– Invest in some really good one to one public speaking coaching.
– Get yourself some excellent presentation training.
Image courtesy of Canva.com
Sources
Quotations are taken from the official transcript where one exists, and otherwise from contemporaneous reporting corroborated across more than one outlet. Word counts were taken from those texts.
– Statement from the new Prime Minister Theresa May, gov.uk, 13 July 2016 (full transcript)
– Boris Johnson’s first speech as Prime Minister, gov.uk, 24 July 2019 (full transcript)
– Liz Truss’s first speech as Prime Minister, 6 September 2022. Not published on gov.uk; quotations here are taken from the full text published by LBC and corroborated against BBC News, CGTN and Al Jazeera reporting
– Chris Mason, BBC political editor, analysis box within “UK can ride out economic storm, says new PM Liz Truss”, BBC News, 6 September 2022
– Rishi Sunak’s first speech as Prime Minister, 25 October 2022, published in full by ITV News and STV News
– Sir Keir Starmer’s first speech as Prime Minister, 5 July 2024, published in full by BBC News
– Andy Burnham’s first speech as Prime Minister, gov.uk, 20 July 2026 (full transcript)
– The Conversation, analysis of Andy Burnham’s first speech, July 2026
