From never in the field of human conflict to there will be no bevvying: What makes a great speech?

He delivered the speech in the heat of history: it still wasn’t clear who would win the Battle of Britain and Churchill was trying to be realistic and manage expectations: “the road to victory may not be so long as we expect, but we have no right to count upon this,” he said. But he was also trying to shore up morale, partly by stirring up some of the emotion he felt in the bunker: “None would have believed that we should today not only feel stronger but should actually be stronger than we have ever been before. The gratitude of every home in our island, in our empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen.”

As speeches go, that tribute to The Few has many of the elements that make for greatness and effectiveness, and the story of the address, and the reaction to it – as well as other historic speeches – reveal the factors that make great speeches work. Churchill in the Commons, Martin Luther King in Washington, JFK at the Berlin Wall, and many more that are not so famous but just as effective – all of them have some of the same factors at play. The factors that make a speech work and last.

One of the most important for Churchill was emotion – his speech was heart-felt which made the connection with his audience easier. But it was also well-structured, and his speeches always involved many hours of preparation: the phrases had been honed and licked into shape; they were not off the cuff. He also knew to keep it relatively simple: “audiences prefer short homely words of common usage,” he once said and the manuscript of his Finest Hour speech is a good example: it shows the word ‘liberated’ crossed out and replaced with ‘freed’.

Many of the same factors can be seen in other speeches that have endured and are often repeated or quoted: emotion, honesty, a coherent argument, a sense of who you’re speaking to, and a talent for a good turn of phrase: the soundbite. One of Scotland’s finest speakers, the trade unionist Jimmy Reid, may have been speaking to entirely different audiences to Churchill and for very different reasons, but he had all of the same talents and skill as the great wartime leader.

Two of Reid’s speeches stand out. The most famous is the speech he made on July 30, 1971 to the workers of Upper Clyde Shipbuilders as the leader of the campaign to prevent its closure by Edward Heath’s Conservative Government. Reid announced that the workers now controlled the yard and would operate a work-in rather than a strike, but he also warned his colleagues that they had to be self-disciplined. "There will be no hooliganism," he said. "There will be no vandalism. There will be no bevvying because the world is watching us." The speech attracted attention around the world.

Another of Reid’s great speeches was delivered a few months later, on April 28, 1972, in the very different atmosphere of Glasgow University's Bute Hall to mark his election as rector. Hundreds of students and lecturers gathered to hear the speech and it was like no other before or since. It was a condemnation of blind economic forces and it contained a killer soundbite: “A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings.”

Reid’s former colleague Davie Torrance, who worked closely with him during the work-in, told me that his friend’s great talent was his ability to speak plainly and simply. "I was amazed at how good Jimmy was as a speaker," he said. "He could explain a complicated situation in a simple way; even sitting down over a pint he had the ability to explain it." He said the workers at the time recognised they had found a man of talent in Jimmy Reid.

The late Tony Benn also said that Reid’s skill was saying what he meant and the audience realising that. “I did marches with Jimmy and we spoke together and he was a very, very powerful speaker,” said Benn. “It was about trust. When people heard Jimmy speak, they trusted him and they listened to him and they believed in him and therefore he had an influence. And all personal relations are about trust and that applies when you're making a major speech as well. My father said to me when I was very young, always say what you mean, mean what you say and do what you said you'd do if you have a chance and don't attack people individually, and those principles I think were reflected very fully in Jimmy's life."

But timing matters too. Another reason that Reid’s speeches, and others like it, broke through and endured is that, as well as being heart-felt and emotional, they were part of significant historical events or political upheaval. Emeline Pankhurst’s speech in 1913 declaring that the suffragettes would fight to the death. Harvey Milk, America’s first openly gay elected official, in 1978: “Young gay people … the only thing they have to look forward to is hope.” Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963: “I have a dream.” And JFK at the Berlin Wall the same year: “I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner!"

The Scottish writer Iain MacGregor, who relates the story of JFK’s speech in his book Checkpoint Charlie, believes the president’s speech hit home and has lingered for the same reason other speeches do: he meant it. “He rewrote sections of the speech,” says MacGregor, “much to the annoyance of his handlers and minders because they wanted him to be much more placatory – he just got seized by the moment. He was a consummate politician but he let his guard drop and the human side of him came out and he said all those things about let them come to Berlin - that’s what resonates with Berliners.”

However, the durability – or forgettability – of a speech is not entirely down to the man or woman who delivers it because as soon as you make a speech – however eloquent and emotional it may be – you lose control of it and you certainly won’t get the reaction you want from everybody. One of the men watching Jimmy Reid’s “no bevvying” speech, for example, was John Taylor, who was 20 years old at the time, and he says a lot of the men were shocked by what Reid said.

"We were all shocked when Jimmy said to us in front of a TV camera that there would be no hooliganism or bevvying because the world was watching us, which seemed to imply that we were hooligans and alcoholics to the very same world he spoke about," he said. "But I reckon it was certainly a very effective way of telling the workers to behave while in the public eye, which they did very well."

And even the greatest speeches in history have their detractors. Clips of Churchill’s speeches are often played and celebrated, but it’s a myth that everyone was rallying behind them. In his book The Roar of the Lion, Richard Toye quotes Evelyn Waugh: “I was a serving soldier in 1940. How we despised his orations!” Other people complained that he sounded drunk, tired, or old and Toye relates how soldiers listening to him in hospital wards would shout “liar” or “bull****!” A great speech isn’t great in everyone’s eyes.

In the modern age, a speech can also be used against you by your enemies, which the Obamas discovered during their first presidential campaign. In many ways, Barack Obama was an old-fashioned orator and it was the speech he gave during his campaign for the US Senate in 2004 that first brought him to nationwide attention and led to him being spoken about as a potential presidential candidate: it was a clear example of the power of the speech. He also knew the power of performance: he could deliver a speech well and that matters: a speech can be good on paper but if you can’t deliver it well, it can bomb.

But it was different for Obama’s wife Michelle. In her autobiography Becoming, she relates how a short clip from her campaign speech during Barack’s first presidential election was taken out of context and used to attack her. She told how her audience how she was proud to see that so many people were hungry for change and she felt privileged, she said, to be witnessing it. But the conservative talk shows and bloggers focused one phrase: “For the first time in my adult life I am really proud of my country.” In her book, she says she didn’t need to watch the news to know how it was being spun: “she’s not a patriot. She’s always hated America. “I’d forgotten how weighted each little phrase could be,” she said.

Her experience is a clear example of how, particularly in the age of social media, one phrase can be taken out of a speech and spun and edited and sliced into something else. Sam Ghibaldan, who was a special advisor to Jim Wallace when he was Deputy First Minister and wrote many speeches for him, agrees that social media has changed the political landscape, but thinks that speeches are still important and thinks many of the old rules still apply. Preparation and performance matter for example, and any good speech, he says, will have been through many drafts and been rehearsed several times. A good phrase or soundbite is also important and the “power of three” still works i.e. repeating something three times or organising your phrase into three points. “It’s not a golden rule,” says Ghibaldan, “but it’s close to it.”

Ghibaldan also believes speeches are still the principal way for serious politicians to develop serious ideas and attract serious support (an example of the rule of three for you there). “A speech is a real way to set out a concept or an idea in a genuinely holistic sense,” he says. “You can’t do it in a press release or a tweet or a soundbite but if you have an idea like New Labour or Cameron’s Big Society or the Lib Dem concept around federalism, you can. You know that no one is going to reprint the whole speech but what you hope is that the people who will hear it or read it are likely to be the filter back into the public.”

You also have to be aware, he says, that the speech will be watched and consumed on different levels by different people, and even more so in the digital age. “From ancient Rome onwards,” he says, “politicians have had to engage different audiences, using techniques from what we’d now call soundbites, to speeches setting out ideas, visions and strategy. The challenge is to use new channels of communication, such as Twitter, to share clips of speeches, but politicians like Obama show it can be done. Beware populist politicians who depend only on soundbites, it’s a sure sign they’ve little of substance to communicate.”

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s chief of communications, agrees that the political speech still matters. “Sadly, all too many politicians appear to think the big political speech does not matter as much as it used to, but I think they are wrong,” he says. “We live in an era when Trump can lead the news worldwide with a tweet of a few words so he probably thinks what is the point of spending hours and days working on a speech? His speeches at rallies tend to be streams of consciousness rather than thought-through speeches. Likewise, most of Johnson’s communications seems to consist of home videos in which he trots out the political line of the day.”

Campbell says it’s clear that the political landscape has changed, including how politicians communicate, but he thinks – and hopes - that it may change again and that the popular politicians of Twitter will be taken down by more serious politicians who can deliver a speech.

“There is no doubt the development of 24/7 news and social media has changed the nature of political debate,” says Campbell, “but I think there’s a danger the politicians learn the wrong lessons. The pressures are all to be tactical. But strategy should still play a bigger role and speeches are an important vehicle for setting out that deeper message and deeper struggle.”

At some point, he says, there will be a powerful backlash against the idiocy of populism and at that point serious politicians will resume the ascendancy. But he has a final warning: “They should be doing it now.”