Page 136 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

market. In one scene, he wonders ‘spontaneously’ if his old house
will still be standing. ‘It is!’, he says poignantly, as the prime
ministerial car drives up. ‘It is!’. It was later revealed that the scene
had been rehearsed and the area secured well in advance of Major’s
arrival, but the broadcast succeeded for many in conveying
Major’s lower-middle-class social origins to an audience widely
perceived to be fed up with thirteen years of Margaret Thatcher’s
haughty grandeur.
The Conservatives’ advertising in the run-up to, and during, the
1997 campaign was less successful. As was noted in Chapter 3
above, the effects of political advertising are determined not by
content alone, but also by the environmental context within which
a political message is sent and received. Between 1992 and 1997,
much had changed in British politics. The Labour Party had
renewed itself under the leadership of Tony Blair, while the Tories
had been damaged by media-fuelled perceptions (reasonably
accurate) of moral and financial sleaze on 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 govern-
ment 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 communications specialists as ‘the people who live in the
4
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

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