Page 130 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

the one hand, and internal division over policy on European union
on the other. As a result, when they attempted to reprise the
‘Labour’s tax bombshell’ theme which had played so well in 1992
(with different specifics, of course, but essentially the same
message—that a Labour government would tax voters until the
pips squeaked) it failed utterly. Indeed, Labour’s counter-
propaganda successfully conveyed the notion that it was the Tories
who were the high-tax party.
The Conservative campaign managers also attempted to make a
negative of New Labour’s widely regarded skills in political marketing
and public relations (see below and Chapter 7). In August 1996,
while the journalistic ‘silly season’ was underway in Britain, leading
left-wing MP Clare Short had given an interview to the New
Statesman magazine, in which she referred to her own party’s
4
communications specialists as ‘the people who live in the dark’ . In
doing so she was articulating the dislike amongst many of her
colleagues of Labour’s new communications professionalism; a
traditional left-wing hostility (see next section) towards the packaging
of politics. In the interview she declared that ‘we could throw away
victory… I think the 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 6.2).
This too failed to resonate with the British people, and merely
succeeded 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

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