THE HARD POLITICAL SELL
that what the Government needs is a marketing manager
IN some ways the Thatcher administration is very like the Gladstone government of 1868-74: it has set about reforming, one by one, the most prominent institutions of our society. Wear and tear is bound to show after a bit. Disraeli, commenting on Glad- stone's front bench, said that it reminded him of 'one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South Amer- ica. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes.' Not much sign of that in the present government, and none at all with Mrs Popocatepetl herself. But, as in Glad- stone's case, the Government is accumulat- ing a growing collection of enemies alien- ated by its reforming zeal.
More significantly the type of opponent it is now taking on is of a much higher quality than in earlier years and possesses superior powers of articulation. It is one thing to anger the union dinosaurs, who condemn themselves by their own defen- sive bellowing, quite another to strike at the vested interests of doctors, lawyers, farmers, teachers, dons and local authority bureaucrats. And, since the Government is also proposing to reform the broadcasting duopoly, the television elites are doing everything in their power to ensure that the anti-government grievances of all the other groups, as well as their own, are given the maximum airing. In the print media, the Government still has many supporters, but there too the attrition of power is taking its toll: the Spycatcher case, the new Official Secrets Bill, the ban on IRA broadcasts, to mention only three sources of friction, have turned friends lukewarm or even into active critics. The fact that ministers were right to take the line they did in these instances is neither here nor there.
All of which helps to explain why the Government suddenly feels itself unloved. It has, of course, had bad patches before, especially in its earlier years. These sprang from internal divisions in the Cabinet and, in the case of Westland, were potentially very serious. But as governments go, the present one is now remarkably homogeneous. The source of the trouble is external: bafflement among groups of its natural supporters, and a feeling among the public that the Government, while whirring furiously on all cylinders, does not quite know where it is heading.
Part of the difficulty is that its long-term strategy is indeed by no means as coherent as Margaret Thatcher likes to think. But at least equally important is the• fact that this ultra-busy regime spends a ridiculously small portion of its energies explaining what it is doing. Some ministers, like Kenneth Baker, are excellent in this didac- tic role, others, such as Kenneth Clarke and Nick Ridley, are not. Mrs Thatcher recently got herself into a muddle by saying that the water privatisation Bill had been badly presented. She hastily corrected herself by saying that what she meant was that it had ' been badly presented by the media. She was right the first time.
Nor is this surprising. It constantly amazes me that the Government does not have a senior cabinet minister whose sole job is to put across its policies. The chairman of a big public company, with whom I was discussing this the other day, remarked: 'It's like not having a marketing manager.' The point is apt: the Govern- ment is producing a massive range of new and usually high-quality products, but it has no one whose job it is to sell them. There is a good deal of old-fashioned snobbery in this. Senior ministers see themselves as rulers: flogging the product would be 'trade'. If Kenneth Baker, for instance, were suddenly taken off educa- tion and given a new job of selling the Government, he would regard it as demo- tion. There is also meanness. Mrs Thatcher grudges allocating a cabinet minister's en- tire time to the non-U business of sales-
manship. She thinks she can get by with Bernard Ingham, a part-time ministerial arrangement, and by hiring Saatchi & Saatchi as occasion demands. But this kind of penny-pinching, unprofessional app- roach will not do any more. The power of the media, and so the importance of political selling, grows all the time: as I've said before, we live not so much in a parliamentary democracy as in a media democracy. Mrs Thatcher's stubborn refus- al to recognise the fact shows that, in one respect at least, she still runs a very old-fashioned government.
Moreover, political marketing is not just a question of managing the media. It has a positive, creative and indeed democratic role. The cabinet minister involved would be not merely telling the public what the Government was doing. He would also, as part of his job, be telling the Government what the public wanted. Now here we plunge into deep waters, Watson. Or rather we run up against a profoundly British prejudice. Even in the commercial world there is still a strong reluctance to give people what they want, as opposed to what their betters think right for them. I have never forgotten a senior design en- gineer in the British motor industry telling me that, when planning a new car, he always designed one he would like to drive himself. He then expected 'the marketing fellows' to sell it. The Japanese notion that the marketing process antedates design and production and begins by careful research into what the public wants and needs, would have been anathema to him.
It is part of the Thatcherite revolution that British manufacturers are slowly learning the lessons of marketing. But even Thatcherite politicians have not yet grasped that the lesson applies to them- selves too. They rightly sneer at the Labour Party for trying to force on the electorate unsalable policies like uni- lateralism. But their approach to politics is not fundamentally different. They still in their hearts believe that the elites know best and that Burke was right to tell his electors in Bristol to drop dead. Mrs Thatcher herself has a powerful populist instinct which has served her well up to now. But like everyone else who has been in power a long time, her populism is becoming blunted, and she takes no more trouble to discover scientifically what peo- ple want than she does to sell what she decides is good for them.
There is still plenty of time to remedy this defective approach before the next election. But it will demand a significant change in our political culture. We like to think that the top cabinet jobs are the Treasury, Home Office and Foreign Office, something which hasn't changed since the early 18th century. It would be a shock to enlarge this cosy trio into a quartet by adding a Minister for the Public. But why not? What is Thatcherism about if it is not about cultural change?
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