A NASTY AND MENACING ELECTION

John Simpson finds remarkable similarities between the style of British and Iraqi political image-makers

'THERE you are, bright-eyed and bushy- tailed,' said the bouncy man in grey, rather bushy-tailed himself. He clasped his hands together like an American preacher about to pounce, and beamed at the audience. They were sitting in a large circle around him, as though they were at a high-tech cir- cus and he were the ring-master. 'I can always tell a Conservative at a hundred yards,' he confided. 'Who on earth is this?' I asked someone from Conservative Cen- tral Office, as we waited for John Major to make his big entrance. 'Bill Roache from Coronation Street,' he answered, and there was a wariness in his voice. The one who successfully sued some newspaper for calling him the most boring man in the world, I asked? 'I'm sure you'll report that fully,' said the Party figure nastily, and moved away. At that moment music blared out, and the prime ministerial face began appearing on several enor- mous screens at once. But the way the official had spoken remained in my mind. Where had I heard that tone before? It was only when John and Norma Major made their big entrance, and Purcell broke out like an electronic corona- tion anthem, that I remem- bered. It was precisely the way Dr Sa'ad used to speak to me.

Dr Sa'ad was the television censor in Baghdad: my least favourite government official there, which is saying something. 'Always you are putting in unpleasant things, Mr John,' he would say. 'I know you, and I know your ways.' The big prob- lem with Dr Sa'ad was that he also thought he knew what we were really doing. If we showed a general view of Baghdad — known in the trade as a `g.v.' — he would cut it out on the grounds that we were try- ing to send pictures of potential targets to allied intelligence. If we used a pleasant, colourful shot of an old man with a donkey, he would cut that out too: 'You are trying to imply that Iraq is a poor, undeveloped country.' My words on the sound-track were minutely examined for signs of hidden malice. 'You said "the President's palace", because you are trying to imply that he owns it himself,' Dr Sa'ad once declared in triumph, as though he had caught me out at last; 'you should say "the presidential palace", because it belongs to Iraq.' Use- less to argue that the point was ludicrously far-fetched, that no British audience would spot such a distinction: Dr Sa'ad, looking dreadfully pleased with himself, cut it all out. 'This report was subject to Iraqi cen- sorship,' intoned the newsreader in London that night; she didn't know the half of it.

It is extremely wearing to have to deal with people who think you have a hidden agenda, and that they know what it is. In travelling round the country with John Major's campaign, it is no part of my job to be snide or destructive: the fact that the warm-up man had been accused of being boring (and won damages when the court disagreed) was irrelevant to the Conserva- tive campaign, so I did not report it that night. What was not irrelevant was to point out that in its early stages many people thought the campaign itself was dull and lifeless. The result of my saying that was distinctly Sa'ad-like. A Conservative party official was on the phone to London in no time, contesting the words I had used and wanting changes.

The various television organisations are becoming wearily used to these calls, which are known to them as 'heavy breathing'. The Conservatives are certainly not the only party to go in for this tactic: the Labour Party and the Liber- al Democrats vie with them in the scope, frequency and intensity of their own heavy breathing: no doubt by the end of the campaign there will have been a rough parity between them, all trying to intimidate the broadcasters into toning down the nega- tive comments, toning up the positive ones, and giving greater prominence to their candidates and their cam- paign.

This is a nastier and more menacing election for the broadcasters than that of 1987, when I covered Mrs Thatcher's campaign. Hers was just as flat as John Major's, and some of the preparation was even worse. No one, however, slipped into the seat beside you on the Conservative campaign bus and told you where you had gone wrong and what you ought to report next time. They do now. No one, either, let you know which were the important parts of that night's speech, with the faint suggestion hanging in the air that if you chose other parts of the speech to report on questions might be asked about it later. They do now. The term 'spin-doctors' is imported from Amer- ica; but there is an important difference between the American and British practice. In the United States the parties try, as they do here, to ensure that the coverage will be as favourable as possible to them; but if it is not they change their own approach. They do not attack the broadcasters nor hint at their possible dissolution. 'Spin-doc- tors': the expression has a pleasant, sport- ing sound to it. In reality the function they perform has nothing to do with cricket. It is Sa'adism.

If Mrs Thatcher tripped over or said something silly, her people were perfectly phlegmatic about it when the pictures hit the news programmes. Much more thick- skinned than Mr Major, she never seemed to know what one had said about her, nor to care. This time, hough, the politicians have convinced themselves that a single slip in their campaign will lose them the elec- tion. As a result, there is immense nervous- ness in the two main political camps. In the Conservative one it may have something to do with experience: the oldest member of the campaign team is said to be 35, and most of the others seem to be in their twenties. On the Labour side the position is different, but the sensitivity is the same. A senior figure in Neil Kinnock's campaign went out of her way to tell me she would be watching my reporting on John Major 'with great interest'. That didn't mean she was a fan: merely that she would be on the tele- phone at any sign that I might be unfairly favouring him.

The tension among some of Mr Major's officials is especially noticeable, however: they all know what happened on Wobbly Thursday last time, and they know that it is perfectly possible for Mr Major to win the election yet lose the campaign, with all that this would mean for them in terms of lost reputations and lost job opportunities. To an outsider, it seems that the one centre of calm and reflection in Mr Major's entourage — apart from Mrs Major, who has kept remarkably cool — is Sir Norman Fowler, his personal adviser. Sir Norman has a safe seat and a Committee post which keeps him interested and occupied; he does not make you feel he is nervous about his personal future. The advice he gives John Major seems likely, therefore, to be both disinterested and considered.

`11 his whole bloody -business has been got up with your cameras in mind,' a sple- netic journalist hissed at me as we stood in a vast, barren, do-it-yourself supermarket in Bradford. The store had marked down everything by 20 per cent for the day in order to attract more customers, but busi- ness was still deplorably slack. The televi- sion crews and photographers shuffled backwards in the path of John and Norma Major as they tried to look interested in the shelves of gloss paint and the displays of plastic knick-knacks. Customers were thrust forcibly aside, wares smashed to the ground. 'If I'd known it was going to be like this,' said the manager afterwards, 'I'd never have invited you all here.'

My sentiments exactly. Who is it that plans these things, that brings the Prime Minister to Yorkshire, one of the national centres of manufacture, and takes him round a supermarket in preference to a factory? Who is it that thinks this makes good television? Most television editors will do anything to avoid these stag occa- sions if they can. A Channel 4 programme last week told us that by lifting up a calf in the 1979 campaign Mrs Thatcher inaugu- rated a new era in television's coverage of elections. Not so. These photo-opportuni- ties, so beloved of the party managers, are done in order to get pride of place on the front pages of the next day's newspapers. They are single shots, planned with stills cameras in mind, and they date back to the 1950s: the time when television interview- ers still asked prime ministers if they had a word for the nation.

What television wants is what, by sheer accident, the Major campaign twice provid- ed in the first week of the campaign: the chance to see how a politician behaves when faced with ordinary people. In spite of themselves, Mr Major's team felt after- wards that the brief, noisy confrontation in Bolton had been a success for them. And when an unemployed Liberal Democrat tangled with Mr Major in the gentrified Corn Market turned shopping mall in Leeds, it was the Nineties' version of the good old 1950's election meeting in the school hall. This is the kind of thing that makes the best television, because it shows in close-up and at length how a candidate for the prime ministership of the country behaves when his or her views are chal- lenged. There is no need to edit it or to add a commentary: the viewers can judge for themselves.

Perhaps for this reason, the party man- agers are deeply nervous about such moments, believing as they do that a single slip could cause their man's downfall. But it is what television is there to find and make the most of if it can. Margaret Thatcher loved these things, and wanted more of '1 did it skiing!' them than her handlers provided; I remem- ber seeing her in some desolate place in 1987, eyes alight, having to be restrained almost physically by her security men from charging across and telling a group of chanting anarchists what was what. That spirit seems to have gone.

An embattled campaign team quickly identifies objectivity with opposition. Look- ing on as an outsider, it seems to me that neither of the main parties (I have no expe- rience of the Liberal Democrats) appears to have any great understanding of, or sym- pathy for, the notion of independent reporting. The Conservative Party has grown used to the journalist as court flat- terer; with the result, you feel, that they think this is how reporters should behave. 'Big Yes for Tory Tax Cuts,' yelled one Daily Express headline last week, in defi- ance of everything that seemed to be hap- pening in the polls at the time. The idea that broadcasters are, by statute, not per- mitted to be part of this claque seems to have passed the Conservatives by. In simi- lar fashion the Labour Party, used to the idea that most of the nation's press is against them, seems to swing between believing that the broadcasters are part of the grand anti-Labour conspiracy, and try- ing to force them to counterbalance the excesses of the Conservative press. In 1987 there was far more heavy breathing from Labour than from the Conservatives. In 1992 the Conservatives have caught up.

The Home Secretary last month gave an interview to the Observer in which he did some heavy breathing of his own. Kenneth Baker was quoted as saying, 'The BBC has got to be very careful indeed over the next eight to ten weeks. The country expects the BBC to be absolutely impartial as it is the state-funded body.' The extraordinary fact that the politician with overall charge of broadcasting seemed to be under the mis- taken impression that his government fund- ed the BBC, and therefore, perhaps, owned it went unnoticed. In reality, of course, it is the ordinary television viewers of the Unit- ed Kingdom who pay for the BBC, not the state. The man in charge of Labour's cam- paign, David Hill, has also been making threatening noises. The BBC, he said, could not necessarily expect that Labour would be sympathetic to it if it did not report on the Labour Party in the way the Labour Party liked. 'If the BBC believes it can operate like this because the Conserva- tives hate it but Labour has a sentimental attachment to it, it had better think again. If it goes on like this and Labour wins, there won't be as much sentiment around for the BBC as it believes.' Whichever party wins will presumably dictate the BBC's new Charter, and therefore its future after 1996. So far, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that both Labour and the Conservatives are using this fact to try to frighten the BBC for their own party advantage: as though the BBC belongs to them and their parties, rather than to the nation as a whole. Life will not be easy for the broadcasters after the election if the politicians do not like the coverage they have received, but it will be even harder if the viewers and listeners — the real share- holders — believe the broadcasters have not been independent-minded.

So far, this has not been a good cam- paign for independent-mindedness. When the campaign managers say they want impartial reporting, they seem to mean reporting which either favours them or which at least does not point out their shortcomings; at the same time, they hope for actively hostile reporting of the other parties. All this may be a political ploy, but it is also their right in a democratic society. Once the election is over, though, are politicians (on the evidence they have so far shown us) really going to be the right people to judge the objectivity of the broadcasters? The main distinction between Dr Sa'ad and the British political party media manipulators is that a demo- cratic society does not allow them the same kind of scope or the same kind of control as Saddam Hussein allowed him. We hope.

John Simpson this week won the Richard Dimbleby Award for outstanding factual reporting, for his coverage of the Gulf war, and other international events.