Page 160 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

POLITICAL PUBLIC RELATIONS

Question Time in the House of Commons is an event without
parallel in the US political system, and may perhaps be viewed as a
more than adequate substitution for the one-off presidential debate.
In the House of Commons a party leader’s success is not measured
in terms of soundbites and slip-ups alone (although these are
noted), but on performance over a parliamentary session, which
may be thought to be a harsher and more accurate test of debating
skill than the 90 or so minutes of a US presidential clash. 2
There are in Britain, in addition, live campaign debates between
more junior politicians in which detailed policy issues are covered.
The party leaders also submit themselves to set-piece interviews by
the most prominent pundits of the day, such as Jonathan Dimbleby,
Jeremy Paxman, and John Humphrys. These occasions allow a
measure of comparison to be drawn between candidates. The Labour
leader’s ‘handling’ of Paxman or Dimbleby can be compared with
that of Iain Duncan Smith and Charles Kennedy. Gaffes are easily
made, and not as easily recovered from. One of the decisive events
of the 1987 general election campaign occurred during Labour
leader Neil Kinnock’s interview with David Frost on the latter’s
Sunday morning Breakfast show. 3 At that stage in the 1987
campaign Labour was doing reasonably well in the polls and had
received some enthusiastic coverage for its advertising campaign
(see Chapter 6). In the course of the interview Kinnock implied,
during an attempt to explain Labour’s non-nuclear defence policy,
that the Soviets would not invade Britain, whether it had nuclear or
non-nuclear defence, because of the strategic difficulty of taking the
islands against determined opposition (including, he emphasised,
guerrilla warfare). This statement of an obvious military fact slipped
out almost unnoticed, until Conservative campaign managers
spotted it on recordings of the show and proceeded to develop a
powerful public relations and advertising campaign around the
theme of Labour’s incompetence on defence (see Figure 7.1).
Kinnock had inadvertently opened up the defence debate, on which
Labour was traditionally weak, and handed the Conservatives a
valuable opportunity to ‘score’. Rather better at these exercises has
been Tony Blair, who, as prime minister, has participated in several
live interview and debate sessions involving journalists and
members of the public. On Ask the Prime Minister (ITV), Question
Time (BBC One) and Newsnight (BBC Two), not only has Blair
broken new ground in British political communication; he has also
avoided the mistakes of Neil Kinnock and other less accomplished
political ‘performers’, and emerged with his reputation intact.

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