The Prime Minister has been making the speech of his life today. After a disastrous week for

Labour at the polls, his job is on the line. This is political fix from the Financial Times

with me, Lucy Fisher. Welcome to the show. It's a slightly different format today, another of our

Q&A specials, where I'm putting to the panel the burning questions that you, our listeners, have sent in.

With me on the show are the FT's chief political commentator Robert Schimsley. Hello, Robert.

Hello, Lucy. Deputy opinion editor Miranda Green. Hi Miranda. Hello, Lucy. And political editor, George Parker. Hi, George.

Hello, Lucy.

Well, first up, I know we wanted this to focus on some of the questions in the ether that we don't always turn to, but we can't escape the news agenda.

It's a huge week.

So let's digest what we've heard from the PM on Monday morning.

George, heralded as the speech of his life, quite low on policy substance, higher on rhetoric.

Was it enough?

It's a good question.

Certainly the speech has been built up in advance.

And I think there's a question about how realistic it is for any speech by any politician to really change the political weather.

It's hard.

What can we think of?

David Cameron's speech to the Tory leadership back in 2005.

I've been thinking about this actually, because maybe George Osborne's speech at the Tory

conference where he announced the inheritance tax changes that dissuaded Gordon Brown not to stand.

And I actually asked a few people on Blue Sky about this.

One that came back was Theresa May's Red Lions speech in the Brexit debate as changing it. There's not many in recent times. It makes you think slightly that somebody's setting him up to fail, to build the speech up to such an extent, is it make or break? Well, it's going to be break. Exactly. Now that's exactly the point I was going to make, that this, speaking to some of his allies who were being briefed on the speech on Sunday as it was being prepared frantically being rewritten. It started off being very kearish and they were trying to beefed up because they were worried that his opponents would build it up as a make or break speech and as he was being set up to fail. In the end, I don't think the speech was a disaster. I thought the optics were quite good. We were discussing this earlier, Lucy, weren't we? The idea that he had supporters there whooping and cheering a bit. I think that this created a slightly better ambiance. He seemed pumped up as well, didn't he? He did. There were no new policies in it, apart from the expected nationalisation of British steel. There was some stuff about how he wanted to show that he actually understood and cared about the lives of working people,

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