Take Care with Your Speech: Five Top Tips

Every speech needs an objective before it needs a single word of script. Burnham's care speech had one: reposition social care as a workforce and funding priority, not an afterthought, and he built the whole speech around that ambition rather than covering every angle of a notoriously complicated brief. Decide what you want your audience to think, feel or do differently by the time you sit down — then let that objective discipline everything you write.

Know your audience — and everything they'll read into your material that you didn't intend. In 2019, Christian Dior had to apologise publicly after a recruitment presentation to Chinese students used a map of China that excluded Taiwan; nobody on the team had checked how a single map would land with the room in front of them. Before you present anywhere, ask what could reasonably be read into your slides, examples or phrasing by the people receiving them. And if you reckon this won't happen to you, just consider how often you're asked to give a presentation for someone with their slide deck! Exactly.

Prepare, plan and write your material properly — and always have a full script to fall back on. Nick Clegg's 2011 civil liberties speech at the Institute for Government contained more word stumbles than usual, the mark of a Deputy Prime Minister who hadn't spent quite enough time with his material. But because he was reading from a prepared script, he kept his structure and his flow, and it cost him nothing more than a slightly less polished delivery. A written plan is what stands between an off day and a real problem.

Edit your material — and make certain the version in your hand is the one you actually edited. Ghana's then deputy communications minister, Victoria Hammah, found this out live on camera in 2013, stopping mid-speech to ask her own aides: "Where is the speech I edited? This morning, I edited this speech, and this is different." Whatever changes you make in the hours before you speak, build in one final check that the copy in front of you is the final copy.

Rehearse thoroughly, and become fully familiar with every part of your material — reading it once, silently, in your head, is not rehearsal. In May 2025, Sir Keir Starmer delivered his "island of strangers" speech on immigration without, by his own later account, ever having properly read it through beforehand, catching the unfamiliar phrase for the first time as it scrolled up the autocue. It was read as an echo of Enoch Powell's 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech, and the row dogged him for a year — cited by his own Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, when he resigned in May 2026, and still being raised when Starmer left Downing Street for good in July 2026. Whatever else is happening around you that day, find the time to read your own words before you say them out loud.