Page 153 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

Party’s Sheffield rally during the 1992 election campaign (see
p. 143). When in 1983 Margaret Thatcher was questioned by a
well-prepared viewer on live national television about the sinking of
the Belgrano she revealed to millions of viewers an unpleasantly
arrogant side of her personality.
The advantage of free media exposure for politicians is founded
on the awareness of the audience that such appearances are ‘live’,
or if not live in the technical sense, something more than a
manufactured political advertisement. And the audience knows
this because politicians frequently slip up, or encounter hostile
opposition and criticism when they enter the free media arena.
A dramatic illustration of this danger occurred in the course of
the 2001 UK general election campaign. As Deputy Prime Minister
John Prescott participated in a walkabout, accompanied by
journalists and minders, his party had to pass by a group of
protesters. One of these managed to strike Prescott with an egg,
provoking him to respond with a physical assault on the protester.
Fortunately for Prescott, the incident was welcomed not as a
disastrous lapse of public control but as a refreshing breath of
spontaneity in an otherwise boring campaign, and his personal
reputation was not seriously harmed by the incident.
A more damaging incident involved Tony Blair, on his visit
during the 2001 campaign to an NHS hospital. Intended as an
occasion on which Labour’s concern for the health service could be
highlighted, the event was instead hijacked by an irate member of
the public, who angrily chastised Blair on the poor service being
received by her husband, at that time a patient in the hospital. Blair
was forced to stand and listen to the outburst, and subsequent
coverage of the day’s events highlighted this moment of reality
intruding into an otherwise heavily orchestrated campaign. The
pursuit of free media and the plan to generate positive images of a
caring prime minister, had backfired into a noisy demonstration
of the dissatisfaction which at least some members of the British
public felt with Labour’s record on health. A year or so earlier,
Tony Blair had delivered a speech to a conference of the Women’s
Institute, a normally polite, sedate organisation of middle-class
women not known for their radical political views. On this
occasion, however, members of the WI in the hall noisily barracked
Blair, forcing him to pause in the delivery of his speech. Media
coverage the next day revelled in this display of public hostility
to the Prime Minister – one of the first such experiences, indeed, he
had had to endure since 1997 – and the incident serves as an

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