The age of “politician-speak” is dead, long live authenticity

Written for Rachel Reeves second budget, November 2025 and was featured on LBC

Chancellor Rachel Reeves will deliver her second budget tomorrow, where she’ll ask British industry and the general public to swallow a “smorgasbord” of tax rises.

As a communicator, I despise the phrase “smorgasbord” - because whilst it’s become the defining phrase of this budget, 95% of the population won’t have a clue what it means. I think transparency is important, so I’ll even admit I didn’t know what it meant outside the context it was being used. 

I don’t particularly care if the Treasury or the media adopted the terminology first, but the Swedish word for buffet doesn’t feel like a particularly transparent way to tell a lot of people they’re about to be poorer. The Chancellor won’t say that, of course, but that’s the reality of this budget. 

Her delivery will be well-rehearsed, managed to the finest detail and at the end of it, almost the entire country will be hacked off. Gone are the days of Ken Clarke and a whiskey - it’ll be the rest of the country that’ll need a stiff drink afterwards. 

But I’m not here to talk economics, although I’d forgive you for being confused based on my opening gambit.

I’m here to tell you that corporate, robot-esque politicians, like Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer, are finally reaching the end of their era. It’s been a long stretch of the same rehearsed lines being delivered through a different vessel. No personality, no relatability and nothing for the public to resonate with. 

And it’s not just in politics, either; private industry is making similar moves back to authenticity in communications. 

But how did we get here?

Reeves will be flanked by a man who is possibly the worst offender of opaque, ‘politician-speak’ language in recent memory: Prime Minister Keir Starmer. 

For a man who has been the leader of the Labour Party for over 5 years and Prime Minister for the past 18 months of that, few know his actual convictions. 

You could make a reasonable argument that, from a political standpoint, being middle-of-the-road in opposition was smart from Starmer. He said nothing, criticised everything, and waited for various imploding Conservative governments to do the rest. 

The Labour 2024 election campaign centred on a single word: ‘Change’. Again, you could argue Labour and Starmer got the measure of the political mood of the country spot on - people just wanted something different, and the electorate awarded Labour a mandate to make good on this vague promise.

But since being given the largest majority in two decades, Keir Starmer has continued to speak as he did in opposition. His messaging sounds statesmanlike, but there's no conviction or relatability; it all sounds like a focus group has manufactured every word to be as perfect as possible. 

And that’s because it pretty much has. Almost every industry has gone through some form of ‘optimisation’ - every element judged and analysed. Communications is no different, and that’s why every speech is starting to sound the same. 

I’m sure if I sat down with Keir Starmer, he’d tell me he’s been very clear about his beliefs. But considering polling from earlier this year showed that 53% of people had no clue what he stands for, even after a year in government, that means he’s either got a messaging problem or a convictions problem. Neither does well in the current political climate. 

It will come as little surprise to most that the Prime Minister doesn’t write his own speeches, nor do most politicians. But for the most senior, they’ll usually have entire speechwriting teams, consisting of a lead speechwriter, some policy wonks, and probably a few advisors. And every single person will be desperate to make their mark and be recognised for their contributions. 

So you end up with ‘optimised’ speeches that say a whole lot of nothing. But at least they sound great to the people writing them.

Much is the same with corporate communications - you’ll have layers of internal bureaucracy, external agencies desperate to look busy and then finally legal waiting in the wings to shoot down any word that’s out of place. 

But people do business with people, and increasingly, they are voting (or planning to vote) for politicians that sound like people, too. That’s why the two political parties set to make the biggest gains at the next election are both led by authentic, direct communicators - Nigel Farage, and more recently, Zach Polanski. 

And the tide is turning in the business world, too. When I was working with Octopus Energy during the energy crisis in 2022, I’ll never forget their CEO, Greg Jackson, explaining that if beer prices had risen as much as the cost-per-therm, your pint of lager would now cost £25. And that’s why your energy bill was going up. Harsh reality - clear messaging. 

I’m still no therm expert, but I know what a pint costs, and so does most of the country. That kind of messaging has kept Octopus Energy at the top of the consumer rankings year on year, and politicians can take note. 

Ultimately, you cannot manufacture authenticity; it doesn’t come from managing every word down to the last vowel, it comes from speaking to people in a language they recognise, and increasingly the language they interact with online. Like an algorithm filters out content you don’t like, the voting public is slowly filtering out the carefully managed corporate-sounding politicians. 

This authenticity revolution isn’t isolated to the UK, and it’s not tied to a single political ideology either. In the US, Zohran Mamdani has recently seen success with the authenticity formula for the Democrats, while Trump has mastered it for the Republicans for close to a decade. Many will remember Trump’s campaign launch in 2015 - it was bashful, unstatesmanlike, but regardless of what you think of the content, it was brilliantly authentic.

My point isn’t to dump on the government or praise politicians without power for speaking freely. Even as polling numbers continue to slump, certain Labour politicians are gaining credibility for talking like a normal person. Shabana Mahmood delivered a career-defining performance to the Commons addressing her asylum reforms, and Wes Streeting slammed the BMA in a ‘gloves-off’ tirade that sounded eminently personable.  

You don’t need to replicate Trump’s all-caps tweets to be authentic or let people know your convictions. You just need to speak like a normal human being and communicate directly, not tell us we have a Swedish buffet of tax rises.