Page 163 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

representatives of the Labour Party showed themselves to lack
confidence and faith in their own approach to the issue.
This confusion, and other failures of the 1983 campaign, prompted
Neil Kinnock, shortly after he became party leader, to form a
‘communication and campaigns directorate’ which would bring all
of Labour’s public relations activities within one management
structure, headed by Peter Mandelson. In 1985 a Campaign
Management Team was established under senior Kinnock adviser
Patricia Hewitt, with responsibility for preparing and executing ‘long’
campaigns, well in advance of the actual election. Thus, when the
1987 campaign started, party leaders had an agenda of issues and
‘theme days’ to work through.
In 1985 Peter Mandelson, as communications director,
recommended the creation of an apparatus which could co-ordinate
the party’s public relations, marketing, and advertising work. It would
function within the context of an agreed communication strategy; a
unified presentation of the political message, using all available media;
and high-quality publicity materials. 7
The Shadow Communications Agency, as it was called, would
enlist as many sympathetic volunteers from the world of professional
communication as possible. With the help of advertising professional
Philip Gould, Mandelson and the SCA strove, with some success, to
prevent the incoherence of the 1983 campaign from ever happening
again. Hughes and Wintour argue that ‘Mandelson and Gould
succeeded, not because they exploited slick advertising and media
management more effectively than the Conservatives, but because
they forged between themselves an approach to political strategy
which has never before been seen… They welded policy, politics and
image-creation into one weapon’ (1993, p.183).
In the campaign of 1987, however, even a vastly improved structure
of internal communication management could not prevent Labour’s
defence policy from once again upsetting the strategy. We have already
referred to Kinnock’s disastrous interview with David Frost. In 1987,
as in 1983, senior leaders’ confusion about, and apparent lack of
commitment to, the party’s non-nuclear defence policy greatly
weakened the campaign overall. Despite the efforts of Mandelson,
Gould, Hewitt and the SCA ‘it was hopeless to imagine that the
party could successfully campaign on a non-nuclear policy, when
the policy itself was internally inconsistent, and self-evidently evasive’
(Ibid., p.16).
The work of the Shadow Communications Agency carried on to
the 1992 election, when it was suggested that the party should ‘deal

146