This paper assays leadership and group identity construction in a corpus of 13 party conference speeches by the party leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party between 1997 and 2003. The chosen comparative approach shows the context sensitivity and strategic use of the pronominal self-references. Changes of pronominal self-reference in party conference speeches can be grasped as strategic changes of footing to foreground either the voice of the party leader or the voice of the party.