Page 141 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 120

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
participated in a walkabout, accompanied by journalists and minders, his
party had to pass by a group of protesters. One of these managed to strike
Prescott with an egg, provoking him to respond with a physical assault on
the protester. Fortunately for Prescott, the incident was welcomed not as a
disastrous lapse of public control but as a refreshing breath of spontaneity
in an otherwise boring campaign, and his personal reputation was not
seriously harmed by the incident.
A more damaging incident involved Tony Blair, on his visit during the
2001 campaign to an NHS hospital. Intended as an occasion on which
Labour’s concern for the health service could be highlighted, the event was
instead hijacked by an irate member of the public, who angrily chastised
Blair on the poor service being received by her husband, at that time a
patient in the hospital. Blair was forced to stand and listen to the outburst,
and subsequent coverage of the day’s events highlighted this moment of
reality intruding into an otherwise heavily orchestrated campaign. The
pursuit of free media and the plan to generate positive images of a caring
prime minister, had backfired into a noisy demonstration of the dis-
satisfaction which at least some members of the British public felt with
Labour’s record on health. A year or so earlier, Tony Blair had delivered a
speech to a conference of the Women’s Institute, a normally polite, sedate
organisation of middle-class women not known for their radical political
views. On this occasion, however, members of the WI in the hall noisily
barracked Blair, forcing him to pause in the delivery of his speech. Media
coverage the next day revelled in this display of public hostility to the Prime
Minister – one of the first such experiences, indeed, he had had to endure
since 1997 – and the incident serves as an exemplary case of the risks
inherent when politicians go in search of free media opportunities. In the
UK election campaign of 2010 prime minister Gordon Brown visited the
English town of Rochdale to ‘meet and greet’ with voters in a routine photo
opportunity. One such voter, Gillian Duffy, criticised Brown to his face, on
camera, and was rewarded with a standard politician’s response – polite but
rather empty of substance. Back in his ministerial car he declared to one of
his advisors:

That was a disaster. You should never have put me with that
woman. Whose idea was that? It’s ridiculous.... she was just a sort
of bigoted woman who said she used to be Labour. It’s ridiculous.

Unfortunately, the microphone he had been wearing on the meet-and-
greet, operated by Sky News, was still on, and picked up every word of his
off-the-cuff remarks. These were then broadcast on Sky News, creating the
major PR ‘gaffe’ of the 2010 campaign, for any party. The next few days
were spent by Brown in frantic apologies to Mrs Duffy and the nation, to no
avail. Labour’s defeat a few days later was attributed by many to this ‘PR

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