Page 169 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee could not achieve. His
successor as Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Home, was in Cockerell’s
opinion unsuited for television, coming across as patrician and
aloof. Labour’s leader at this time, Harold Wilson, on the other
hand, presented a populist, approachable image, which helped him
to win and hold on to political power for much of the ‘swinging
Sixties’.
The pre-eminent image manager in post-war British politics, until
the rise of Tony Blair, was of course Margaret Thatcher. With the
assistance of public relations adviser Gordon Reece, in the late
1970s Margaret Thatcher allowed herself to be ‘made-over’, i.e.
made more appealing to potential voters. When elected Conservative
leader in 1976 Thatcher, like most politicians when they first
achieve senior status (Tony Blair is an exception in this respect),
paid little attention to her image. She looked as she wished to look,
and spoke in the way which apparently came naturally to her, with
a nasal, pseudo-upper class accent. Under Reece’s guidance she took
lessons to improve her voice, deepening its timbre and accentuating
its huskiness. Her hairstyle and clothes were selected with greater
care. Thatcher had accepted the view that ‘clothes convey messages,
because they involve choice, and those choices express personality’
(Bruce, 1992, p. 55).
Personal image matters, for former Thatcher adviser Brendan
Bruce, because its constituents – clothes, hair, make-up, etc. –
signify things about the politician. Image can, with skill, be
enlisted to connote power, authority and other politically desirable
attributes. All this Margaret Thatcher understood. And just as
the Tories led the way with their use of commercial advertising
techniques, so did their emphasis on personal image – and their
readiness to manufacture images where necessary – predate that
of their opponents. In 1983 as the Conservative government,
fresh from the Falklands victory, presented its leader as the
‘Iron Lady’, Labour fought an election campaign led by Michael
Foot. Foot’s intellectual qualities were never in doubt, but his
naivety and innocence in the matter of personal image made
him vulnerable to being constantly satirised and subverted by the
media. Most notoriously, when he attended the 1982 ceremony
of Remembrance at the Cenotaph in London dressed in a duffle
coat, standing as protocol demanded alongside the power-dressed
figure of Margaret Thatcher, his ‘fitness to govern’ (always a
predictable Tory allegation against any Labour leader) was publicly
questioned.

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