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Introduction
While their primary function would appear to be initiating, or opposing, a legislative and policy programme, and managing the governmental bureaucracy that is supposed to implement it, British political leaders spend much of their time doing something else: talking. From routine announcements to off-the-cuff remarks, press conferences, official statements, and of course parliamentary debate, British politicians deliver a lot of speeches about whatever it is that they are initiating, opposing or managing -- and about a lot more besides. For example, Gordon Brown became Prime Minister on 27 June 2007. By the end of that year he had delivered 22 'set-piece' speeches, given 19 formal statements to the press and participated in 20 press conferences. That amounts to 71 speech occasions not including media interviews, parliamentary speeches or statements, speeches made in his capacity as leader of the Labour Party and unrecorded speeches (such as those given to the Parliamentary Labour Party or within closed government meetings).1
The extent of such speech-giving would seem to constitute a prima-facie case for making their investigation central to British political studies. Yet while scholarly research often uses such speeches as a source there is in fact little systematic research into the place or the function of speeches as such within British political life. Journalists may summarise and on occasion 'review' them as part of their commentary on the cut and thrust of day-to-day politics. Discourse and conversation analysts have certainly put the technical linguistics of such speeches under the microscope and use them as a way of exposing and criticising what they understand as ideologically motivated obfuscation (see, for instance, Bull, 1994; Beard, 1999; Chouliaraki and Fairclough, 1999; Fairclough, 2001; Chilton, 2003). And some social and political theorists have utilised political speeches to make observations about wider transformations in ideology and the functions attributed to the state (see Hall, 1988; Heffernan, 2001; Levitas, 2005). But, for all their ubiquity in political life and its analysis, we do not yet have a systematic approach from the perspective of political studies that seeks to relate the general phenomenon of the political speech to political activity and institutions more broadly (although on this see McLean, 2001; Hindmoor, 2004 Reference Hindmoor, 2004 not listed in references. Please provide complete...