Culture Wars

by James Curran

  The reporting of the subsequent 1979 election was vitriolic and provided textbook examples of what we are calling ‘extreme spin’. Perhaps the most memorable was a Daily Mail front page featuring ‘Labour’s Dirty Dozen: 12 big lies they hope will save them’10 which was a direct lift from a Conservative Party press release. One such ‘lie’ was that the Tories would double VAT from 8% to 16%; this claim was strenuously denied by the Conservatives at the time, but they went on to increase VAT to 15%, subsequently arguing that since Labour had said the rate would go up to 16%, then to call it a ‘lie’ was correct.

  Following the 1979 election, Jim Callaghan resigned as Labour leader to be succeeded by veteran left-winger Michael Foot. He provided the press with a seemingly irresistible target; the daily humiliation of Foot was described as ‘monstering’, within what used to be known as Fleet Street. Through his three years in office, Foot was a constantly portrayed as an extreme left-winger, and a slightly ‘bonkers’ old man. Foot’s background in newspapers – he was a former editor of the Evening Standard – did not protect him from the almost daily mocking for his allegedly left-wing views (which most left activists regarded as very much a thing of the past), for his slightly old-fashioned way of speaking but above all, simply for his appearance. He took over the leadership at the relatively old age of sixty-seven, but looked older. He walked with a stick, wore pebble-lens spectacles and dressed as befitted a man of letters (as he was) from a non-conformist background. Foot’s dress-sense, or lack of, came sharply into focus when, attending the service of remembrance for the war-dead at the Cenotaph in London in 1981, he wore a coat (dubbed, incorrectly a donkey jacket) that appeared to be out of keeping with the solemnity of the occasion. Even the normally sympathetic Guardian described him as ‘looking as if he had just completed his Sunday constitutional on Hampstead Heath’.11

  Despite the hostility that he had received from the press throughout his political career, Foot never developed the sort of rugged defences against the media that Mrs Thatcher had installed around herself and as Tony Blair did too. Indeed, Foot’s biographer, Kenneth Morgan described his press officer – Tom McCaffrey – as ‘no Alastair Campbell spin-merchant, but a professional civil servant who broadly, gave the unvarnished facts and was fully trusted by journalists and the media’.12 Morgan went on to outline Foot’s pitifully small private office – ‘nowhere near enough to help the leader impose his authority’.13 But handling the media came low down Michael Foot’s list of priorities during his time in office. Not that he (or more pertinently his team) didn’t think it important, but it was because internal party matters – including a split to the right by the nascent Social Democratic Party and battles to the left with the Militant Tendency – made it difficult for Foot or his office to focus on these presentational issues.

  Foot’s lifestyle gave added grist to the mill of a hostile press. His daily habit of walking his dog Dizzy (named after one of Foot’s heroes, the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli) made him a target for tabloid picture editors. Photographers could be guaranteed to get a picture of Foot as a lookalike of the fictional scarecrow ‘Worsel Gummidge’, simply by shouting his name from afar. Foot would return the ‘greeting’ by waving his walking stick in the air, which made for a great ‘loony’ photo. Indeed, according to Chippindale and Horrie, two former journalists who wrote a ‘biography’ of the Sun, photographers covering Foot were instructed ‘no pictures of Foot unless falling over, shot or talking to militants’14

  It would be fallacious to argue that the press representation of Foot as either shambling and unkempt, or a dangerous left-winger (because, for example, of his continued support for unilateral nuclear disarmament) was the cause of Labour’s disastrous performance in the 1983 election. The Labour Party was in a state of internal war, which encouraged the press to emphasise the significance of the ‘loony left’ narrative. In 1981, Labour left-winger Tony Benn challenged Dennis Healey for the deputy leadership of the party. Benn had become a popular figure on the left – indeed Bennite was how the Labour left wing was almost universally described. Although not directly associated with the Militant Tendency, the group supported Benn and he, in turn, opposed their expulsion from the party. The media characterised Benn’s deputy leadership campaign (which he narrowly lost) as representing the near takeover of the party by the far, or hard, left.

  The notion of ‘loony left’ control was further cemented in the public mind when, in 1983, there was a parliamentary by-election in the South London constituency of Bermondsey. The local party selected a left-wing gay activist – Peter Tatchell – as their candidate, despite this being a traditional right-wing seat, dominated by London dock workers. The press, and the opposition parties, mounted a homophobic campaign against Tatchell; Labour’s cause was not helped when Foot declared that Tatchell would never be the official Labour candidate. But Foot was overruled by an increasingly left-wing national executive and Tatchell stood. He was subsequently defeated, losing the seat to the Liberal candidate Simon Hughes, who himself subsequently came out and who, in 2006, apologised to Tatchell for the gay smears he had used in that by-election campaign.

  None of this was the best possible preparation for the 1983 election in which Foot was no match for a Margaret Thatcher riding high on her victory in the war in the Falklands. James Thomas, in his study of post-war Labour and the tabloid press, described the 1983 General Election as ‘the most hostile Press labour had experienced for 50 years’.15 The attacks on Foot were merciless: ‘Do You Seriously Want This Old Man to Run Britain’ asked one Sun headline16 Apart from the sheer personal abuse Foot sustained, the Labour Party was the victim of a number of ‘fake news’ stories. The Daily Express ran a story in which it claimed that marchers protesting against mass unemployment had ‘refused’ offers of work en route. The story was untrue – it was based on Express reporters checking out the vacancies on the job centres along the marchers’ route. The Daily Mail carried a story claiming that the Japanese car-maker, Nissan, was threatening to pull out of the UK if Labour won, a claim strenuously denied by the company. The Mail’s reporting was so slanted that journalists on the paper voted by six to one to condemn their own newspaper’s election reporting. During the campaign, the Sun described Tony Benn as ‘dedicated ruthless [and] bent on the destruction of Britain as we know it’.17

  Following that defeat, Michael Foot stepped down and, waiting in the wings to take over, was another politician representing a South Wales constituency, someone whom Foot regarded as almost like a son, Neil Kinnock. The contrast between the two men, in terms of their attitude to the media could not have been more different, though both ended up being attacked, humiliated and pilloried by the Conservative-supporting press.

  Kinnock was a familiar figure. Late at night in the conference watering holes of Blackpool and Brighton, in the years of Callaghan and Foot’s leadership of Labour. A regular sight was the young Neil Kinnock drinking and carousing with party members and journalists alike. Kinnock was liked and admired by much of the press and was a good TV performer, not that any of this helped him when he took over the reins of leadership from Foot in 1983. Indeed, at the very Labour conference of that year, when Kinnock beat Roy Hattersley for the Labour leadership, the most memorable image of the conference was not a triumphant Kinnock waving to the adoring mases from the conference platform but instead, Kinnock being ‘saved from the waves’ by his wife Glenys became the headline story, as the ‘ideal seaside photo opportunity’ went horribly amiss when, as Neil and Glenys strolled along the water’s edge, a sudden wave swept Kinnock of his feet. Conservative historian and Daily Mail contributor Dominic Sandbrook claimed that the picture became ‘the abiding image of the conference, even of Kinnock’s leadership – a man utterly out of his depth, shamelessly courting the media and making a complete fool of himself in the process’.18

  Unlike Foot, Kinnock came into the leadership surrounded by a far more robust team of advisers. They had learnt harsh lessons about the me
dia during Foot’s leadership and went about applying these lessons ruthlessly, both during and even before Kinnock’s ascent to the leadership. Many commentators see Tony Blair’s successful bid for the Labour leadership in 1994 as the first New Labour campaign, but that was not the case. Kinnock was, if not propelled into power, at least substantially helped, by a cadre of former Labour student politicians, who had learnt their politics fighting the far left in the very hard school of politics that was (and is) the National Union of Students. They became Kinnock’s praetorian guard, both in getting him elected and defending him both against the right (in the form of Ray Hattersley and his supporters) and also against the Militant Tendency and the Bennite left. This cadre of young supporters was mobilised and organised by politicians, later to become cabinet ministers, including Patricia Hewitt, Charles Clarke and, most crucially Peter Mandelson, who in 1985 was appointed the party’s Director of Communications.

  Kinnock’s appointment of Peter Mandelson as the party’s new Director of Campaigns and Communications in 1985 was a pivotal moment in the birth of New Labour. Almost as important was the role of Phillip Gould, a long-time Labour supporter with a marketing background. Gould is an important figure in understanding this period, not just because of his intrinsic importance in setting-up and running the Shadow Communications Agency – an organisation of volunteer PR, advertising and marketing experts, led by Gould and reporting to Mandelson – but because in his autobiography he sets out, with unabashed honesty, how he saw the making of New Labour:

  I saw the final betrayal of the people I had grown up with the people the Labour Party had been formed to serve but whom it had abandoned. Labour had not merely stopped, listening or lost touch: it had declared political war on the values, instincts and ethics of the great majority of decent, hard-working voters. Where were the policies for my old school-friends – now with families and homes of their own – in a manifesto advocating increased taxes, immediate withdrawal from the EEC, unilateral disarmament, a massive extension public ownership and import controls.19

  Just months after Mandelson’s appointment, Gould sent the new Director of Communications an analysis in which he set out how he perceived Labour in terms of its public standing and how, in marketing terms, it had to re-invent its ‘brand’ as an essential prerequisite to winning power. Gould’s sixty-four-page analysis became a crucial text in the battle to transform Labour. In it Gould wrote:

  Positive perceptions of the Labour Party tend to be outweighed by negative concerns, particularly of unacceptable ‘beyond the pale’ policies and figures; the party sometimes acts in a way that confirms these concerns by scoring ‘own goals’; there is some feeling that the Labour Party does not, as it once did, represent the majority, instead it is often associated with minorities; the party has something of an old-fashioned cloth cap image.20

  Out of this report grew the Shadow Communications Agency (SCA), described by journalists Colin Hughes and Patrick Wintour as: ‘Labour’s secretive but influential image-makers. It was there, among aides and volunteers in the marketing and advertising world, that the idea of building a party fit for the millennium germinated’.21 But it is unhelpful to view the SCA as having an autonomous existence separate from the Labour leadership. Admittedly, its terms of ­reference, as drafted by Gould, were wide-ranging, including drafting strategy, conducting and interpreting research, producing advertising and campaign themes and providing other communications support as necessary. But it was always Peter Mandelson’s, and thus Neil Kinnock’s, tool rather than their master. Gould and the SCA were providing the Labour leadership with what it wanted – the wherewithal to transform the Party from where and what it was to what they wanted it to be. And once the decision had to be taken to shift campaigning from traditional forms of political activity – meetings, leafleting and so on – to media-based campaigning, then it was inevitable that media and marketing professionals, in other words the SCA, would come to dominate Labour’s policy-making processes, as well as its communications structures.

  But if the Labour leadership thought that the SCA’s new communications strategy had lanced the ‘loony left’ boil, they were to be sadly disappointed when, in the last months of 1986 as Labour was preparing for the coming General Election, the Conservatives (and the newspapers that supported them) stepped-up their onslaught against the Party, the spectre returned. This report from The Times was typical:

  Two Cabinet ministers last night launched one of the Conservatives’ strongest attacks yet on Labour’s ‘loony left’ council leaders. Mr Nicholas Ridley, Secretary of State for the Environment, told the Commons that some were behaving like Eastern bloc commissars ruling people by fear. And Mr Norman Tebbit, the Party Chairman, claimed that the ‘loony left’ was poised to take over the Parliamentary Labour Party. Mr Ridley said: ‘I am told that people dare not speak out for fear of what might happen to them and their families. Perhaps they cannot really believe it is happening in England in the 1980s. It is more like Poland or East Germany: the knock on the door in the middle of the night. It is totalitarian, it is intolerant, it is anti-democratic, and it employs fear to control people. Every day’s newspapers contained new horrors about the attack on local government by Labour-controlled councils. Town halls founded on civic dignity had become an arena for aggressive political posing, disruption, wild accusations, threats and fear. It is vicious, it is frightening, and it is deliberate.22

  The Conservatives, whether consciously or otherwise, were aided by the Labour leadership itself. Two days after the Ridley/Tebbit onslaught, the Financial Times reported Labour as responding thus:

  Mr Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, yesterday attacked extremist left-wing councils which he claimed attracted lurid headlines and obscured the real achievements of the majority of Labour-controlled local authorities. His comments, which acknowledge the potential electoral damage the activities of extremist councils could inflict on Labour, come immediately after repeated government broadsides aimed at what ministers have dubbed the ‘loony left.’ The Government believes that in exploiting the well-publicised excesses of a number of local authorities they have found an important weapon with which to attack Labour in the run-up to the next general election. Mr Kinnock told a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party attended by nearly 90 MPs that the sensationalism attached to the actions of a few councils obscured the efforts of most of the Labour movement at local level. He said many Labour councils were working under near impossible conditions to turn their policies into practical help and the credit due to them was obscured by extremism. He added: ‘It simply proves yet again that the greatest enemy of radicalism is zealotry. When idealism is made to look like extremism it is the ideals that are discredited.23

  Labour’s own research suggested that the Conservative’s attack on the ‘loony left’ was well-chosen; it was telling them that the crucial swing voters saw Labour as ‘a party in disarray’, its leader as a ‘very nice bloke’ but pushed about and bullied by extremists, the unions, immigrants and homosexuals’.24 It was this research, and the pressures emanating from the Conservatives ‘loony left’ campaign, which led to Labour’s most traumatic moment in the run-up to the 1987 election – the Greenwich by-election.

  By-elections were, in the 1980s, important media events – emblematic of the parties’ public standing. The late Vincent Hanna, a BBC political reporter, had developed a mode of by-election reporting that transformed these seemingly routine political events into something akin to television entertainment. He baited weak candidates, challenged electors with their own apathy and dreamed up stunts, all with an eye to making by-elections into ‘good television’. As a result, far greater public attention was trained on by-elections than had been the case in the past or was to be in the future.25

  Thus, when a by-election was called in the South London constituency of Greenwich, there were great fears that the Labour candidate, almost irrespective of whom he or she might be, would be subjected to the sort of vitriolic a
ttack that had been unleashed on Labour’s candidate in the Bermondsey by-election the previous year (referred to above). The local party selected one of its own activists – Deidre Wood – to fight the by election. Up until that point, she had not been known as a particularly prominent member of the local ‘loony left’, but that was not the impression that would have been gleaned from contemporary newspaper accounts, as these examples from the Guardian, the Financial Times and The Times reveal:

  Ms Deidre Wood is, her opponents say, the hard face of the London Labour left: full-time politician, husband of allegedly even wilder opinions, four sons of unknown opinions, lives in the East.26

  Despite her refusal to have a political label attached to her, [Deidre Wood] is considered to be on the hard-left of the party … it is known that the party leadership, which is anxious not to alienate traditional supporters or to hand ‘loony left’ ammunition to its opponents, would have been happier to see a more moderate candidate emerge from the selection process.27

  The selection of Miss Deidre Wood, a supposedly hard left member of the Inner London Education Authority, to fight the forthcoming Greenwich by-election had her political opponents rubbing their hands with glee last night’.28

  It is worth noting, from these quotations (all from serious broadsheet newspapers), how Ms Wood’s ‘hard leftism’ is, or is not, attributed. The Guardian attributes the description of her politics as ‘the hard face of London Labour’ to ‘her opponents’; the Financial Times tells us that she is ‘considered to be on the hard left of the party’ (by whom, it is not specified) and The Times uses the word ‘supposedly’ to justify its description of Ms Wood as ‘hard left’. However, among these non-attributions lies one important clue as to where it is all coming from. The Financial Times tells us that ‘it is known that the party leadership … would have been happier to see a more moderate candidate emerge.29 And, if further proof were needed, it came from the BBC’s Vincent Hanna who told the Guardian that the smearing of Deidre Wood had been started by elements in Labour’s headquarters in Walworth Road who were keen to prevent her from being selected.30