on the other hand,
presented a populist, approachable image, which helped him to win and hold
on to political power for much of the ‘swinging Sixties’.
The pre-eminent image manager in post-war British politics, until the rise
of Tony Blair, was of course Margaret Thatcher. With the assistance of
public relations adviser Gordon Reece, in the late 1970s Margaret Thatcher
allowed herself to be ‘made-over’, i.e. made more appealing to potential
voters. When elected Conservative leader in 1976 Thatcher, like most
politicians when they first achieve senior status (Tony Blair is an exception
in this respect), paid little attention to her image. She looked as she wished
to look, and spoke in the way which apparently came naturally to her, with
a nasal, pseudo-upper-class accent. Under Reece’s guidance she took lessons
to improve her voice, deepening its timbre and accentuating its huskiness.
Her hairstyle and clothes were selected with greater care. Thatcher had
accepted the view that ‘clothes convey messages, because they involve
choice, and those choices express personality’ (Bruce, 1992, p. 55).
Personal image matters, for former Thatcher adviser Brendan Bruce,
because its constituents – clothes, hair, make-up, etc. – signify things about
the politician. Image can, with skill, be enlisted to connote power, authority
and other politically desirable attributes. All this Margaret Thatcher
understood. And just as the Tories led the way with their use of commercial
advertising techniques, so did their emphasis on personal image – and their
readiness to manufactureimages where necessary – predate that of their
opponents. In 1983 as the Conservative government, fresh from the
Falklands victory, presented its leader as the ‘Iron Lady’, Labour fought an
election campaign led by Michael Foot. Foot’s intellectual qualities were
never in doubt, but his naivety and innocence in the matter of personal
image made him vulnerable to being constantly satirised and subverted by
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the media. Most notoriously, when he attended the 1982 ceremony of
Remembrance at the Cenotaph in London dressed in a duffle coat, standing
as protocol demanded alongside the power-dressed figure of Margaret
Thatcher, his ‘fitness to govern’ (always a predictable Tory allegation
against any Labour leader) was publicly questioned.
In the wake of the 1983 defeat, not only did Labour transform its
approach to advertising and public relations in general, it selected in Neil
Kinnock a leader whom it was felt could compete with the Conservatives,
on the terrain of image as well as policy. Like Margaret Thatcher, he
permitted his dress-sense, hair-style, and voice to be coached and shaped.
His successor, John Smith, was equally adept at image-management,
although the constituents of his image (intelligent, reliable, safe) were
different from Kinnock’s (passionate, tough). Smith’s successor, Tony Blair,
was elected largely because of his perceived ability to look and sound good
for the cameras, and to communicate, with his image, to the electorally
crucial voters of southern England. Nick Jones argues that Blair was indeed
the first UK party leader to have been chosen for his ability to say ‘only
what he wanted to say and what he believed to be true’ (1997, p. 9).
It may be, of course, that the importance of image is overstated, and
that audiences have gradually learned to ‘read’ the practices of imagemanagement and discount them. Thatcher’s successor John Major was
widely perceived as ‘lacking’ in image, meaning that his style was rather
plain and simple. During the 1992 general election campaign Major
adopted the old-fashioned practice of addressing the public from a ‘soap
box’ erected outside his campaign bus. Notwithstanding the occasional egg
or flour bomb, Major’s simple, homely style of campaigning did not prevent victory on 9 April and may indeed have contributed to it. In the view
of some commentators the ascendancy of John Major as Conservative
leader and Prime Minister signified a retreat from – or backlash against –
the sophisticated image management techniques which characterised British
politics in the 1980s. On the other hand, Major’s ‘lack’ of image may in
itself be read as a careful construction, calculated to position him, brandlike, in the political marketplace. While Neil Kinnock displayed a slick and
glossy self, John Major would be seen as the ‘real thing’, unadorned and
transparent.
In Brendan Bruce’s view, Major’s image comprised the following elements:
comparative youth; good looks; modest social background; courteousness;
‘ordinariness’ and the common touch (considered to be an advantage after
eleven years of Thatcher). In short, Major was all the things which Mrs
Thatcher was not. Major’s image-managers also stressed his love of cricket
(Bruce, 1992, p. 93). Under the chairmanship of Chris Patten, the Tories’
public relations strategy was to portray Major as representing ‘Thatcherism
with a human face’. As Patten put it, ‘we are trying to achieve incremental
change to fit a change of Prime Minister. In supermarket terms we want to
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sell an updated product, not a new brand’ (quoted in Butler and Kavanagh,
1992, p. 39).
The success of John Major in the election of 1992 (if not subsequently)
indicates that in political image-management, as in other branches of the
style industry, fashions change. The subsequent rise of Tony Blair, however,
and the ‘making over’ of his party into New Labour (and all that has gone
with that in terms of party organisation and media relations) confirm that
the image managers remain at the heart of the political process. As this
edition went to press, the Conservative leader David Cameron had just been
elected to lead a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, and
was being compared to Tony Blair in his determination to transform the
Conservatives’ public image, and to present himself as a youthful, dynamic
contrast to his predecessors. To this end in the period before the 2010
election, he participated in a number of pseudo-events, such as visiting the
Arctic to demonstrate his commitment to green issues (accompanied by the
campaigning slogan, ‘Vote Blue, Get Green’), being photographed riding his
eco-friendly bike to work, and ‘hugging a hoodie’ in the name of presenting
a more liberal law and order policy. By contrast, the successor to Tony Blair,
Chancellor Gordon Brown, had an austere reputation. To overcome this
image of ‘dourness’, he spent much of the period between 2007–10 demonstrating his warmth and accessibility to journalists (see above). This image
management strategy was unsuccessful, and Cameron emerged as the victor
in 2010, though with no overall majority.
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