This paper considers the Party Conference Speech as a paradigmatic example of effective political discourse, so as to identify and analyse the elements that make for the successful reception of a speech, and determine the ways in which the leader brings about consensus and generates applause. Methodologically speaking, our framework for analysis combines (i) quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as (ii) textual and multimodal analyses of the performed text. We start with a quantitative overview of party conference speeches analysed as written corpora, before zooming in on Tony Blair’s 2006 party conference speech, in which we identify what non-verbal strategies come into play in the discursive construction of the leader’s individual and the party’s collective identities.