POLITICS
When too many minders may spoil the message
NOEL MALCOLM
The news that several senior advertis- ing executives are to act as 'minders' to government ministers will be greeted on the Tory back benches with mixed feelings. There is a huge reservoir there of ill-will towards the professional public relations johnnies — a reservoir topped up not long ago when the MPs received all those unsolicited letters from 'image consul- tants', telling them to powder their bald heads for the televising of Parliament.
Among the intellectuals there is a natu- ral contempt for the merchants of images and sound-bites. One has only to dip into Making an Impact (David & Charles, 1989) by the Tory PR guru, Harvey Thomas, which contains such insights as 'if Isaiah had been writing for the 1990s he might have said, "The Word shall never return void but its impact will be a whole lot greater if it's presented well" ', to see why. One has only to read Harvey Thomas, in fact, to start feeling like an intellectual.
But at the same time there is a pathetic faith among many Conservative politicians in the power of good advertising to smooth away all cares. This is partly because they spend such a large proportion of their time talking to the Tory faithful, who can never believe that other people can genuinely disagree with the Government's policies. If the policies are doing badly in the polls, they can only assume that the Government is 'failing to get its message across', and complain to their MPs accordingly.
And the other reason for the renewed Tory faith in the PR men is of course the wondering admiration which has grown up towards the activities of Mr Peter Mandel- son at Labour Party Headquarters. He has managed to raise the quality of Labour's presentation, at a time when the policies he was meant to be presenting were being either rewritten or not written at all. Whether the lack of policies was a hind- rance or a help is a matter of some debate. But Mr Mandelson has certainly disproved the proverbial wisdom of the idea that people who make bricks without straw shouldn't throw them from glass houses.
The Tory Party's latest enlistment of advertising men looks at first sight like a deliberate attempt to follow in Labour's footsteps. Labour's real pathfinder here was not in fact Mr Mandelson, but his less well known colleague Philip Gould, who was impressed by the achievements of the Republican Party's 'Tuesday Group' in the
United States — a group of senior advertis- ing people who gave their services free to the party on a part-time basis. The 'shadow communications agency' which Gould per- suaded Mandelson to set up in early 1986 was based on this principle, with advertis- ing experts from agencies such as Boase Massimi Pollitt and Abbott Mead Vickers working free of charge. And now Mr Kenneth Baker, the Conservative Party chairman, has persuaded his own gaggle of PR supremos (is there a collective noun, along the lines of an exaltation of larks? A lunch of ad-men, perhaps?) to do likewise.
The skills of these PR men, both com- mercial and political, are not in doubt. Mr Tim Bell, who will be advising the Home Secretary, is the former director of Saatchi and Saatchi who handled the Tory account in 1979 and 1983. Mr John Banks, chair- man of the Young and Rubicam agency, who will be working with the Health Secretary, has been advising the Prime Minister on and off since 1984: his role as a key adviser in the 1987 election (reporting to Mr Wakeham and Lord Whitelaw) was kept secret from the then Party chairman, Mr Tebbit, just as Mr Bell was smuggled past Mr Tebbit into 10 Downing Street by Lord Young. Mr Banks's agency has many commercial successes to its credit, includ- ing the famous 'Beans Means Heinz' slo- gan; and Mr Robin Wight, who will be advising the Education Secretary, is chair- man of the agency (WCRS) which dreamed up 'It's less bovver than a hover' and 'I bet he drinks Carling Black Label'. Theirs will be an uphill task, all the same: somehow 'I bet he votes Conservative' lacks bar-room credibility.
But where this whole exercise parts company with the Gould-Mandelson mod- el is in the idea of hiving off individual advisers to individual ministers. It is true that Mrs Thatcher's senior ministers have suffered a whole series of accidents, bloomers and banana skins in recent weeks. First Mr Ridley caused outrage with his laconic dismissal of the evidence against the Al Fayeds; then Mr Wadding- ton was in trouble over the Strangeways riot; then Mr King had his knuckles severe- ly rapped by the Appeal Court; then Mr Ridley was at it again, dismissing one of the proposed reforms of the poll tax before the new Cabinet poll tax reform committee had even met to consider it. It is easy to shake one's head and say that the Cabinet is becoming accident-prone, but difficult to show that there is any real pattern here.
And it would be even more difficult to prove that PR advisers could have pre- vented the mishaps from mishappening. The Home Office intervention at the start of the Strangeways riot looks like exactly the sort of thing that a PR adviser would have recommended: don't escalate matters — if anyone is killed, you'll get much worse publicity', and so on. If the crucial countermanding order came from Mr Waddington, it rather looks as if he is in need of less PR advice, not more. Similar- ly, an ad-man would not have saved Mr King from his embarrassment over the television interview he gave on the 'right to silence'. A legal adviser might have saved him, but a publicity adviser would prob- ably have urged him to speak out more strongly, to promote his 'law and order' image. In fact the only one who obviously needs an 'image' minder is Mr Ridley; but since his whole appeal as a politician lies in the fact tht he treats 'image' politics (and the media in general) with undisguised loathing and contempt, the proposal in his case would amount almost to a contradic- tion in terms. Telling a PR man to advise Mr Ridley on his 'image' would be rather like asking a tethered goat to lecture a tiger on the virtues of vegetarianism.
What Conservative Central Office has so far failed to do is to match the real achievement of Messrs Gould and Mandel- son's 'shadow agency': not the accumula- tion of creative talents, but the co- ordination of their ideas. The key to Mr Mandelson's success was his skill at manag- ing an overall publicity theme at any one time, a theme which was fed to the public through every available outlet — party political broadcasts, news conferences, ministerial speeches and so on. The theme of the present phase of Labour's campaign is the idea that the Tories have betrayed their own supporters: hence, for example, the refrain of their last election broadcast, `Are they really the party of law and order? Are they really the party of the home- owner?' and so on. The only discernible theme that the Conservative Central Office can come up with now is that the poll tax is really not such a bad thing after all. Mr Baker will have to do better than that. Now is indeed the time for all good ad-men to come to the aid of the party — not to the aid of individual ministers.
Previous page
