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PROFESSIONALISATION IN THE BRITISH ELECTORAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT | 55

THE PROFESSIONALS: WHO ARE THEY?
The discussion above – and the examples used – lend support to the view that political
parties organise themselves in such a way as to try to manage and control the electoral
environment. The individuals cited above – Lord Woolton, Oliver Poole, and Peter
Mandelson, amongst others – represent individuals at the vanguard of a process of
change, but they are individuals who tend to work within the remit that their elected
political masters permit. This last point is also true for those like Philip Gould, New
Labour’s pollster,who has helped the party during its project of change.

Given the evolving nature of British political parties into increasingly centralised parties
with a very small membership and consequently financial base, and that modern
politics is highly mediated, it is perhaps understandable that those in charge of them
will seek to hire outside professionals to aid them in their quest for electoral success. In
the British context, and given that elections take place every 4 or 5 years, the pattern
seems to be that parties employ the services of outsiders rather than employ them
within the party as permanent full-time employees. Here one would include the
pollsters, advertisers, and consultants who come to the aid of the party as elections
loom. Sometimes advisers take on more permanent roles but as advisers to individuals
as, for example, Gordon Reece for Margaret Thatcher or Amanda Platell, head of media,
for William Hague. The positions of these advisers become inextricably tied up with
those of the politicians they serve.

There probably are several advantages to having outsiders come to the help of the
party at intervals rather than be employed permanently by the party. One advantage is
clearly that of minimising costs.Hiring or using advisers full-time would be expensive in
itself and there may be few such professionals who would seek to devote all their
energies – and the resources of their own organisations if they are experienced heads
of polling or marketing agencies – to one client. Another advantage is that outside
professionals can be used to establish campaigning units separate from the party’s
general organisation and usually working to the leadership; the party organisation can
thus be bypassed. A third advantage is that such arrangements allow for both change
and continuity – one can hire and dismiss advisers much more easily than one can
permanent staff and they can be used to reinforce the fact that the political centre Professionalisation in the British Electoral and Political Context
remains the dominant partner in the relationship.

Such organisational structures also ensure that politicians and party bureaucrats work
in conjunction with expert/professional advisers but usually retain overall control of
election strategies, for better or worse. A good example of this comes from the
Conservative Party’s election campaign in 2001. Whilst the data collected for that
party’s campaign pointed in one direction, key people in the party overlooked the data
or imposed their own interpretation on it. As Andrew Cooper, the party’s then opinion
researcher, observed in his account of the 2001 campaign, ‘the overwhelming
information’collected was ‘ignored’(Cooper,2002,p.102). 57