Page 152 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

employed to design the annual conferences, which he did according
to the principle that ‘on a political platform we only get a few
seconds on BBC news [or ITN] …we’ve got to make sure that those
few seconds are absolutely pure as far as the message is concerned’
(quoted in Cockerell, 1988, p.325). In the search for ‘purity’ the
stages on which conference speakers and party leaders sat were
constructed with the same attention to form and colour co-
ordination as a West End stage set. At the 1983 conference, the
first following the Thatcher government’s victory in the Falklands,
the stage resembled nothing more than a great, grey battleship, on
which the Tory leadership sat like conquering generals.
As Thomas recognised, mass media coverage of that conference,
and most others, was limited to at most a few minutes. Although in
Britain there is a tradition of live coverage of the conference debates
on the minority audience BBC2 channel (now augmented by coverage
on Sky News, BBC24 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

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