Page 126 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 105

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obsession with the media and the focus groups is making us look as if we
want power at any price and we don’t stand for anything. I think they [the
people who live in the dark] are making the wrong judgment and they
endanger our victory’.
Conservative campaign managers seized on this dissent, and the dramatic,
menacing imagery which Short used to express it, to design a series of ads
highlighting the allegedly sinister, manipulative nature of New Labour. The
infamous ‘demon eyes’ poster, depicting Tony Blair literally as the devil, was
the most spectacular example of a campaign which tried to convince the
electorate that professional political communication was only marginally
more acceptable in a democratic society than devil worship. It failed,
however, in so far as it had no discernible impact on public opinion and
voting intentions, and did not prevent the landslide Labour victory of May
1997.
The Tories also tried to exploit Labour’s relatively pro-European policy
with a poster ad depicting Tony Blair sitting, puppet-like, on the knee of the
then German chancellor Helmut Kohl (Figure 6.3). This too failed to
resonate with the British people, and succeeded merely in generating negative
publicity for the Conservatives, who stood accused of xenophobia and
political immaturity. Both the ‘demon eyes’ and ‘Blair as Kohl’s puppet’
campaigns showed that the political environment was no longer one in
which crude Labour-bashing messages could find a receptive audience

Figure 6.3 Labour’s position on Europe.
Source: Saatchi.

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