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PROFESSIONALISATION IN THE BRITISH ELECTORAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT | 47

The increasing use of professionals from outside political parties, as well as the
professionalisation of political actors themselves, can be seen as part of the desire to
control the conditions under which political parties compete against one another in
order to gain advantage. As Lord Windlesham put it, perhaps cynically – drawing on the
work of Stanley Kelley – ‘in a competitive situation anyone seeming to offer special
knowledge or special skill that might conceivably lead to electoral advantage is likely to
be looked on with favour’(1966,p.246).

One of the key points that I would like to emphasise is that many of the changes we are
exploring in this volume are part of the process of adaptation of political parties to their
environment and not specific to any particular era. Professionalisation is about the
acquisition and exercise of skills to manage change: change in practices and structures,
change in the ways in which individuals and groups see things and define what works
and what does not; it is about adaptation to a constantly changing economic, political,
technological and cultural landscape and it is about finding ways to exercise control
over that change. Those who are able to, or make claims to, manage the process of
change are the professionals. In the context of political communication they are the
opinion pollsters, the political advisers, the advertisers, the trainers of politicians, media
employees (journalists, broadcasters, film makers), and sometimes also academics who
offer advice to political organisations based on their working experiences. Each, in their
own way, claims to offer insights into how the electorate behaves and what needs to be
done to gain their support. In the much larger picture of how governments
communicate, each can offer advice on how to sustain governments in power; in the
context of pressure and lobby groups each can offer insights into how to advance
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arguments,and so on (Kelley,1956; Davis,2002).

In this chapter I want to argue that by looking at the changing nature of political
parties over the last 70 years or so we can better understand their perceived need to
constantly re-organise themselves in order to improve their prospects of winning
elections. This process of re-organisation can be subsumed under the heading of
‘professionalisation’ as it highlights the increased attention paid to a more methodical
(and so less amateurish) way of dealing with the interface between parties and the
electorate.With developments in forms of mass communication and the means of mass Professionalisation in the British Electoral and Political Context
persuasion, political parties were/are also forced to turn to those with the appropriate
skills who could help them get their messages across. As Kelley concluded,
‘technological advance has made political communication a highly technical, if not a
professional,field’(1956,p.104). 2

But turning to history for illustrations of developments brings with it a particular
problem, namely, how does one make a judgement about the significance or
importance of events? For example, it appears that the Conservative party first
employed a full-time public relations adviser in 1946. Does this fact make subsequent
appointments less significant or does it point to the need to be more precise about the 49