Page 175 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

public campaigning work to the more radical voices of John
Prescott, Tony Benn and Ken Livingstone.
Such tactics were again insufficient, however, to deliver electoral
success. Labour improved its position by comparison with the
results of the 1987 election, but failed once more to deprive the
Conservatives of an overall majority. In the aftermath of a fourth
consecutive general election defeat, an internal debate began within
the party which echoed earlier ambiguities about the value of
political marketing. Once again, senior Labour voices could be
heard decrying the pernicious influence of the image-makers and
asserting that Labour should dispense with them, or at least down-
grade their role in campaigning. The SCA was accused of robbing
the party of its socialist identity, in favour of red roses and gloss.
Despite such criticisms, however, the election of Tony Blair as
leader in July 1994 signalled the ascendancy of Labour’s image-
managers: those like Patricia Hewitt, Peter Mandelson and others
who believed that a Labour victory was conditional on ‘moving
from a policy committee based process to a communication based
exercise’ (Heffernan and Marqusee, 1992, p. 103). The astonishing,
and unpredicted landslide election victory of May 1997 vindicated
that approach, which inevitably followed New Labour into
government. Professional communicators like Mandelson, Alistair
Campbell and Charlie Whelan were key players in the first Labour
term, often commanding more media attention than the politicians
who were ostensibly their masters.
As ‘the people who live in the dark’ moved into the media
spotlight, however, political public relations, and spin in particular,
became a victim of what I have called elsewhere ‘demonisation’ by
journalists (McNair, 2000), its techniques and practitioners almost
universally reviled. In the most blatant example of ‘spinning out of
control’, a media adviser in the government’s transport department,
Jo Moore, was caught out when, on 11 September 2001, she sent
an internal e-mail suggesting that this would be ‘a good day to bury
bad news’. She survived that incident but was removed from her
post a few months later after another PR gaffe, as was her minister
in charge, Stephen Byers. In September 2002 the Sunday Times
reported the ‘dirty tricks’ activities of New Labour’s so-called
Attack Unit, which varied from simple rebuttals of perceived smears
against the party and its leadership to compiling dossiers on
opponents and leaking negative details from them to the media.
As a result of such stories, coverage of which was increasingly
dominating the political news agenda in the first half of Blair’s

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