Page 163 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

packed news agenda. There is therefore a tendency for journalists
to look for the ‘essence’ of the event – a particular phrase in the
leader’s speech, for example – and to organise coverage around
that feature. Hence, the discourse emanating from conferences is
constructed in the expectation that only a small part of it will be
repeated to the audience which matters. Speeches are loaded with
‘soundbites’ – convenient, memorable words and phrases which can
become the hook around which journalists will hang a story. Mrs
Thatcher’s ‘This lady’s not for turning’ speech of 1981 is an excellent
example of the phenomenon. The speech and the circumstances of
its delivery are long forgotten, but the phrase lingers on in the
public imagination, evoking the ‘essence’ of Thatcherism. Similarly,
the soundbite ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’, came
to symbolise New Labour’s radical centrist approach of combining
a stress on law and order with concern for social justice.
Political speeches, then, delivered in the pseudo-event environ-
ment of a televised party conference, attempt to satisfy the
journalists’ need for easily reportable ‘bits’ of political information,
in such a way as to set the news agenda in the politicians’ favour.
As the previous chapter noted, the Labour Party paid little
attention to political public relations in the early 1980s, and paid
the electoral price for that neglect in 1983. But as the decade
progressed, the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock successfully
emulated the techniques pioneered by Thomas and the Tories. More
attention was paid to the ‘look’ of a conference, involving every-
thing from the choice of logo to the cut of the speaker’s suit. The
debates, which at Labour conferences had always been genuine
exchanges of view (evidenced by their frequently rancorous,
anarchic quality), often leading to media coverage of ‘splits’ and
‘disunity’, became like those of the Tories, bland and artificial, with
the real acrimony taking place behind closed doors. The Labour
Party, to be fair, has not (even in the era of Blair and Mandelson)
travelled as far down this road as the Conservatives, whose
conferences were by the 1990s organised as little more than
expressions of adulation for the leader, even when the leader was
John Major, a man manifestly unpopular with his party members.
In 1993 Labour allowed its conference to engage in a potentially
damaging display of ideological disagreement when it debated the
party’s links with the unions. On this occasion the leadership won
the debate, and was thus able to present then-leader John Smith to
the media audience as a commanding figure. After his election as
Labour leader in 1994, Tony Blair had to face some difficult

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