What can we learn from the party leader speeches?

Posted by Nick Laitner at Thu, 08/04/2010 - 9:51am in Political commentary

We have been busy crunching all three of the leaders' campaign kick-off speeches, to see if any interesting themes emerge.

Looking at Gordon Brown's announcement, given with his Cabinet at his shoulder yesterday, it is clear that he was keen to prioritise what he would like to be the dividing lines between him and David Cameron in this campaign. A word-cloud of the PM's speech yesterday looks like this:

The words recovery, decisions and team feature prominently, highlighting three of these dividing lines immediately:

1. We'll lock in the recovery, the other guys will endanger it
2. I've got the tough decisions on the economy right over the last couple of years, unlike Dave and George
3. I've got heavyweights like Peter and Alistair with me. How many of the shadow cabinet can you name?

(By the way, nice of the PM to give such a big shout out to Mandate. Thanks Gordon, appreciated).

David Cameron's remarks on the Thames yesterday morning were a touch less formal:

Change and country figure prominently here, which provides a certain taster of one of the Tories' key campaign messages. But does the relatively light usage of the word optimism foreshadow a more gloomy campaign than the one Cameron promised in his husky-hugging days?

Also, given the informal nature of the speech yesterday, it is interesting to see the verbal tics of just and gonna getting such an airing. Perhaps Dave truly is the heir to Blair.

Nick Clegg's speech to his activists yesterday was also pretty revealing:

Look at the prominence of the two main parties in the Lib Dem leader's first campaign address. This appears to be a fairly clear assertion that the third party will be fighting this election as the 'none of the above' option, a strategy that builds on their clever "Labservatives" proposition last week.

Other interesting words here are (unsurprisingly) Vince and, of course, Iraq. And I'm sure that Nick Clegg's most repeated word was intended to say something, but I'm really not sure what that something is.

(Word clouds generated using wordle)

Tagged with: Nick Clegg, Gordon Brown, David Cameron