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control of a party leader, and for a level of coordination of activities across the country
that others may have simply dreamed of. So, it is not surprising to note that others have
now adopted some of the practices. For example, the Conservative Party has now
begun to exert greater control over its constituencies in order to ensure that there is a
uniformity of practices that will be to its advantage (see Watt,2004).

The elections of the 1990s and of the new millennium provide us with two general
lessons that need to be addressed, albeit briefly.The first of these is that the outsiders –
the experts, advisers, polling professionals, and others – do not recreate political parties
and policies as much as feed into a process that is already taking place. For the Labour
Party, the lost elections of 1983 and 1987 offer a background to the desire for change,
as the discussion above described.The ‘modernisation project’ carried on into the 1992
election, although it stalled under the leadership of John Smith (leader 1992–1994).
After Smith’s sudden death in 1994, Tony Blair’s election as leader in 1994 gave the
‘project’ added momentum. The fact that the process did stall under Smith shows how
political considerations – personalities,principles,and traditions – mediate the power of
the professional advisers. In Blair, the modernisers found someone who saw the need
for change in the same way that they did, and who was willing to move ahead as fast as
they did (or faster).

The other lesson is that for change to take place it is critical to have the right
organisational structure (and the right staff). In this respect, it is interesting to note two
things: the Labour campaigns post-1987 were run away from the party’s traditional
head office, so symbolically creating a new locus of power away from the traditional
party base (in 1997,for example,it was run from Millbank); secondly,and as Philip Gould
has acknowledged, rebuilding Labour required not only a new set of principles but also
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
a ‘new campaigning organisation’ (1998b, p. 6). The campaign was ‘structured around a
war-room in which all campaign operations and all campaign personnel were in the
same physical space; opposition activity was constantly monitored; attacks were
instantly rebutted; dialogue with the electorate was constant. From top to bottom,
voter feedback was built into the system’(1998b,p.7).

The centralisation of the campaign and the skilled use of professionals enabled the
Labour Party to come to power after many years in the wilderness. But it has also raised
questions about the power and influence of the unelected outsiders who work in the
shadows and who serve the centralised power structure. Have they taken over? Have
party bureaucrats been displaced? Have politicians lost control over parties? Have
political principles been abandoned?

All these questions simplify a very complex picture of change, as the above discussion
shows, but they do need some consideration.The next section offers some thoughts on
these questions.

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