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William Pitt the Younger
Born
Maiden speech, February 26, 1781
Aged 21 and seated for Appleby only weeks earlier, Pitt rose in support of Burke's plan of economical reform, a measure to cut the Crown's patronage. Burke's verdict, usually reported as not a chip off the old block but the old block itself, a nod to Pitt's father, the Earl of Chatham, became one of the most quoted compliments a first speech has received. Lord North called it the best first speech he had ever heard. It is the earliest speech here and the template for the debut that announces a future leader on the spot.
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Benjamin Disraeli
Born
Maiden speech, December 7, 1837
The great failure among first speeches, and the most instructive. Disraeli spoke in a debate on Irish election petitions, and Daniel O'Connell's supporters met his elaborate phrases with laughter and noise until Hansard recorded that much of what he said could not be heard. He gave up with the line still quoted to nervous new members, usually given as: though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me. Read it beside his later triumphs to see how far a reputation can recover from a ruined debut.
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David Lloyd George
Born
Maiden speech, June 13, 1890
A 27-year-old Welsh Liberal, in the House for barely two months, used his first speech to take on two of the biggest names in politics. The government planned to spend public money buying out pub licenses, and he opposed compensating publicans, calling it a puny attempt to grapple with a great evil. Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Randolph Churchill, who had both spoken up for compensation, he mocked as "a kind of political contortionists" whose direction nobody could predict. The Nonconformist temperance radicalism and the gift for ridicule that carried him to Downing Street are both already on show.
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Winston Churchill
Born
Maiden speech, February 18, 1901
A 26-year-old Conservative, fresh from reporting the war in South Africa, rose straight after David Lloyd George's attack on the Boer War. Churchill called the amendment mild and moderate and said the bitterness of Lloyd George's speech was all his own, then startled his own benches by saying that if he were a Boer he hoped he would be fighting in the field, while urging that it be made easy and honorable for the Boers to surrender. The independence from party that would take him across the floor in 1904 is already audible.
More about Winston Churchill5
F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead
Maiden speech, March 12, 1906
The debut often called the most famous of all, and the plainest case of the gentle-first-speech convention thrown away on purpose. The January 1906 election had crushed the Conservatives, and the new member for Liverpool Walton used a free trade debate to make his speech as offensive to the triumphant Liberal benches as he could, with Lloyd George, then President of the Board of Trade, a chief target. Tim Healy, the Irish Nationalist and a master of invective himself, is said to have sent a note telling him he had beaten Healy at his own game. One sitting turned an unknown barrister into his party's star turn.
More about F. E. Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead6
Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor
Born
Maiden speech, February 24, 1920
The first time the Commons heard a woman member speak. Astor, the first woman to take her seat, stood before a chamber of several hundred men, many of them hostile, and chose what she called that vexed question, Drink, opposing a motion to lift the wartime restrictions on alcohol. She said she was speaking for the women and children who could not speak for themselves. The theme was no passing choice: in 1923 her bill against selling alcohol to under-18s became the first private member's bill by a woman to pass into law.
More about Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor7
Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge
Born
Maiden speech, April 25, 1929
A miner's daughter from Fife, just elected for North Lanark at 24 and the youngest member of the House, went straight for the Chancellor in the Finance Bill debate. She called Winston Churchill's budget a mixture of cant, corruption and incompetence, and a Unionist who spoke later praised the speech as courageous, spirited, clever and dramatic. It set the tone for a left-wing career that later produced the Open University. It is the sharpest example here of a newcomer refusing the customary deference to the front bench.
More about Jennie Lee, Baroness Lee of Asheridge8
Margaret Thatcher
Born
Maiden speech, February 5, 1960
The rare first speech that changed the law. The new member for Finchley had won a place in the private members' ballot and used her debut to move the Second Reading of her own bill opening council meetings to the press. She gave Finchley a single sentence, saying it would want her to come straight to the point, and went on to the bill's purpose. A Conservative colleague congratulated her on an outstanding maiden speech, and the bill became the Public Bodies (Admission to Meetings) Act 1960. Hear the briskness that would define her style two decades later.
More about Margaret Thatcher9
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey
Born
Maiden speech, April 22, 1969
Elected for Mid Ulster at 21, then the youngest woman ever returned to the Commons, Devlin made her maiden speech on the day she arrived in Parliament, rather than settling in first as new members usually do. She spoke as Northern Ireland's crisis deepened and turned on the Unionist establishment that ran it, speaking of a ruling minority of landlords. Members across the House praised it, and Norman St John-Stevas called it electrifying. It came only months before British troops were sent onto the streets, and reads now as a warning the House did not heed.
More about Bernadette Devlin McAliskey10
Tony Blair
Born
Maiden speech, July 6, 1983
Worth reading for the gap between the speaker and the man he became. Labour had just suffered its worst defeat in decades, and the new member for Sedgefield used a Finance Bill debate to describe unemployment of over 40 percent around the Wingate employment exchange. Then came a credo: he was a socialist not through a textbook or unthinking tradition, but because socialism at its best corresponds most closely to an existence both rational and moral. Followers of New Labour will find its moral framing, and little of its later caution, already in place.
More about Tony Blair11
Jo Cox
Born
Maiden speech, June 3, 2015
A conventional maiden speech in form, praising Batley and Spen and the communities that make it up, which is exactly why it matters. Cox observed that, for all the celebration of diversity, the people of her constituency were far more united and had far more in common with each other than the things that divide them. After her murder a year later the line became her memorial, and in 2021 her sister Kim Leadbeater echoed it in her own maiden speech for the same seat. Watch it for how much a first speech can carry.
More about Jo Cox12
Mhairi Black
Born
Maiden speech, July 14, 2015
The maiden speech of the social media age. Black, the SNP's 20-year-old member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South and the youngest in the House, attacked the budget that had just abolished housing benefit for anyone under 21, then turned to the Labour benches and quoted Tony Benn in an offer to work together: let us be that opposition. The clip was watched almost 3.5 million times on one Facebook page within a day. It is the clearest example of a first speech reaching far beyond the chamber.
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Heidi Allen
Born
Maiden speech, October 20, 2015
A government backbencher using her whole first speech against a flagship policy of her own party is almost unheard of. The new Conservative member for South Cambridgeshire chose a Labour Opposition Day debate on George Osborne's tax credit cuts to warn that they went too hard and too fast for working families. She then voted with the government that evening, which drew charges of hypocrisy alongside the praise. The speech is a sharp study in how far dissent can go on day one, and a hint of the independence that later took her out of the party.
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