Page 159 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

the way with their use of commercial advertising techniques, so did
their emphasis on personal image—and their readiness to manufacture
images where necessary—predate that of their opponents. In 1983
as the Conservative government, fresh from the Falklands victory,
presented its leader as the ‘Iron Lady’, Labour fought an election
campaign led by Michael Foot. Foot’s intellectual qualities were never
in doubt, but his naivety and innocence in the matter of personal
image made him vulnerable to being constantly satirised and
subverted by the media. Most notoriously, when he attended the
1982 ceremony of Remembrance at the Cenotaph in London dressed
in a duffle coat, standing as protocol demanded alongside the power-
dressed figure of Margaret Thatcher, his ‘fitness to govern’ (always a
predictable Tory allegation against any Labour leader) was publicly
questioned.
In the wake of the 1983 defeat, not only did Labour transform
its approach to advertising and public relations in general, it selected
in Neil Kinnock a leader whom it was felt could compete with the
Conservatives, on the terrain of image as well as policy. Like
Margaret Thatcher, he permitted his dress-sense, hair-style, and
voice to be coached and shaped. His successor, John Smith, was
equally adept at image-management, although the constituents of
his image (intelligent, reliable, safe) were different from Kinnock’s
(passionate, tough). Smith’s successor, Tony Blair, was elected largely
because of his perceived ability to look and sound good for the
cameras, and to communicate, with his image, to the electorally
crucial voters of southern England. Nick Jones argues that Blair
was indeed the first UK party leader to have been chosen for his
ability to say ‘only what he wanted to say and what he believed to
be true’ (1997, p.9).
It may be, of course, that the importance of image is overstated,
and that audiences have gradually learned to ‘read’ the practices of
image-management and discount them. Thatcher’s successor John
Major was widely perceived as ‘lacking’ in image, meaning that his
style was rather simple and plain. During the 1992 general election
campaign Major adopted the old-fashioned practice of addressing
the public from a ‘soapbox’ erected outside his campaign bus. Not-
withstanding the occasional egg or flour bomb, Major’s simple,
homely style of campaigning did not prevent his victory on April 9,
and may indeed have contributed to it. In the view of some
commentators the ascendancy of John Major as Conservative leader
and prime minister signified a retreat from—or a backlash to—the
sophisticated image management techniques which characterised

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