LLast weekend's Liberal Democrat conference speech from Ed Davey was, by most accounts, uninspiring and insipid. That's not a new verdict — when we first featured one of his speeches fourteen years ago, our conclusion was the same: an uninspiring orator. In fact, that piece prompted a message from his own speechwriter — and the follow-up review, of a considerably better outing, was a much easier one to write. What's changed since then is the stakes. He's now party leader, and most of the post-speech commentary has focused on his closing rallying cry — the part that was clearly meant to launch something bigger.
The trouble is, a rallying cry (We Care. We Fight) only works if it's built like one. Whether you're opening a political campaign, launching a new product, or announcing a merger, a campaigning speech has to do a specific job: fire people up and give them something to carry out of the room. Here are five things it needs to do.
Top Tips for Your Campaign Launching Speech
Tip 1: Be Interesting
Before anything else, a campaign speech has to earn attention in the first thirty seconds. Don't open with process or procedure — open with a stake in the ground. If your audience is checking their phone in the first minute, the rest of the speech won't matter.
Tip 2: Be Memorable
A speech that's forgotten by Monday hasn't done its job. Give your audience one line they could repeat to a colleague who wasn't in the room. If nothing in your speech survives outside the hall, it wasn't a campaign speech — it was an update.
Tip 3: Repeat
Repetition isn't a crutch, it's a tool. Donald Trump's "fight, fight, fight" works because it hammers a single idea until it's unshakeable. You don't need three words — you need one idea, said more than once, in a rhythm your audience can feel coming.
Tip 4: make a Statement
Campaign speeches need a line that stands entirely on its own, stripped of qualification. Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" and "Four More Years" both work because they commit to something, without a caveat trailing behind them. Find the sentence in your speech that needs no footnote, and build the rest around it.
Tip 5: Coin an Acronym
It sounds gimmicky until you see how well it works. MAGA is on hats, on flags, on merchandise — it's shorthand for an entire movement, and it needles Trump's opponents every time they hear it. An acronym gives your campaign a shape people can hold onto and repeat without even meaning to.
If Ed Davey's speech was meant to be the opening shot of a campaign, it needed to hit at least two or three of these. It hit none. That's not really a comment on his politics — it's a comment on his speechwriting and his delivery.
Launch Your Campaign with a Successful Speech
Aim to launch your next campaign with a successful speech that meets all your objectives.
For more public speaking and presentation tips, you'll find our full series here. And when you're ready to sharpen your own public speaking skills, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
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