Page 150 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 129

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS
tradition of live coverage of the conference debates on the minority audience
BBC 2 channel (now augmented by coverage on Sky News, BBC News and
BBC Parliament), the main news bulletins, whose audiences the politicians
are most concerned to reach, treat them merely as stories (albeit important
ones) in a packed news agenda. There is therefore a tendency for journalists
to look for the ‘essence’ of the event – a particular phrase in the leader’s
speech, for example – and to organise coverage around that feature. Hence,
the discourse emanating from conferences is constructed in the expectation
that only a small part of it will be repeated to the audience which matters.
Speeches are loaded with ‘soundbites’ – convenient, memorable words and
phrases which can become the hook around which journalists will hang a
story. Mrs Thatcher’s ‘This lady’s not for turning’ speech of 1981 is an
excellent example of the phenomenon. The speech and the circumstances of
its delivery are long forgotten, but the phrase lingers on in the public
imagination, evoking the ‘essence’ of Thatcherism. Similarly, the soundbite
‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, came to symbolise New
Labour’s radical centrist approach of combining a stress on law and order
with concern for social justice.
Political speeches, then, delivered in the pseudo-event environment of a
televised party conference, attempt to satisfy the journalists’ need for easily
reportable ‘bits’ of political information, in such a way as to set the news
agenda in the politicians’ favour.
As the previous chapter noted, the Labour Party paid little attention to
political public relations in the early 1980s, and paid the electoral price for
that neglect in 1983. But as the decade progressed, the Labour Party under
Neil Kinnock successfully emulated the techniques pioneered by Thomas and
the Tories. More attention was paid to the ‘look’ of a conference, involving
everything from the choice of logo to the cut of the speaker’s suit. The
debates, which at Labour conferences had always been genuine exchanges of
view (evidenced by their frequently rancorous, anarchic quality), often
leading to media coverage of ‘splits’ and ‘disunity’, became like those of the
Tories, bland and artificial, with the real acrimony taking place behind closed
doors. The Labour Party, to be fair, has not (even in the era of Blair and
Mandelson) travelled as far down this road as the Conservatives, whose
conferences were by the 1990s organised as little more than expressions of
adulation for the leader, even when the leader was John Major, a man
manifestly unpopular with his party members. In 1993 Labour allowed its
conference to engage in a potentially damaging display of ideological
disagreement when it debated the party’s links with the unions. On this
occasion the leadership won the debate, and was thus able to present then-
leader John Smith to the media audience as a commanding figure. After his
election as Labour leader in 1994, Tony Blair had to face some difficult
moments at party conferences, over such issues as the reform of Clause Four
of the constitution and other cherished ‘old Labour’ policies. Despite such

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