The Lady's Not For Turning | On Reading A Speech Out Loud
In this case, a speech by Margaret Thatcher
Recently, I devoted a whole week of daily newsletters to Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 speech to the Conservative Party Conference.
Margaret Thatcher statue.
I read the whole speech out loud, just to see what I might learn from doing so – as I did with speeches by Winston Churchill and Tazeen Ahmad in A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech.
At the bottom of this page, I’m posting the whole thing: my introduction, Thatcher’s speech (read by me) and my final thoughts on what it was like to read it. But that video is 34 minutes long, and I don’t suppose many people want to watch it all.
Intro
So here’s the first bit. My introduction, with the opening couple of paragraphs of the speech, including an interruption and how Thatcher dealt with it:
Key soundbite
Here’s the paragraph containing the line from which the speech now takes its name:
Final words
And here are the last words of the speech, plus my immediate reflections on what it was like to read the speech out loud:
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The Whole Thing
And if you really can’t bear to miss the whole thing, including my opening and closing remarks, it’s below.