BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 24
nature of the relationship Campbell had enjoyed with Blair, nobody
could in any case have convincingly stepped into the former’s shoes once
he had left. In that sense the style of New Labour media management
after Campbell was always going to be different. In addition, however, the
circumstances surrounding Campbell’s departure and the widespread
feeling that he had become too public and controversial a figure meant
that the debate about his succession was not just confined to a question of
individuals but also covered appropriate structures, norms and procedures. Campbell’s replacement in the new slimmed-down post of
Director of Communication at No. 10 was David Hill, who had previously been head of communications at Labour Party headquarters. Hill
41 Ibid., p. 25.
was regarded as a dedicated and intelligent professional, trusted by journalists, and a less keen advocate of pre-emptive ‘spin’ than his predecessor. However, he was also seen as not nearly so close to Blair.
The bigger question was whether the structural changes proposed by
Phillis would work. While the recommendations in reaction to the perceived excesses of the Campbell era were understandable, some argued
that the distinction between partisan and non-partisan information is
fundamentally flawed. Sir Bernard Ingham, for example, contends that it
is possible to have only one spokesperson at No. 10, either a civil servant
or a party political appointee. Gaber not only agrees with this criticism,
but also argues that the Phillis recommendations simply strengthen
the communication power of Downing Street: ‘Phillis has based many
of its recommendations on the unsustainable assumption that this
Government’s communication effort is weak and uncoordinated and that
the remedy lies in the path of greater centralisation.’42
Conclusion
Blair’s legacy in the field of media management is a mixed one. With
regard to his leadership role, he certainly recognised the significance of
the media in an age in which public performance, presentational skills
and ‘looking the part’ are aspects of politics no longer simply confined
to the few weeks of official election campaigns. During his short period
as Leader of the Opposition and then the first couple of years of his
premiership Blair came across particularly well on television as the
embodiment of a new type of political leader: a young, family man, at
ease with the cameras, unbridled by the old politics of left–right ideological conflict, firm in his values and pragmatic in policy choices. In
this context it is hardly surprising that some see in David Cameron
a Conservative version of the mediatised style of Blair’s early years of
leadership.
Blair was also successful in winning the support of key media owners
and newspaper editors for New Labour. While the support of a newspaper’s editorial column may not shift many readers’ votes during the
short period of an election campaign, the steady drip effect of negative headlines and critical commentary has over time an undoubted
42 Ivor Gaber, ‘Going from Bad to Worse: Why Phillis (and the Government) Have Got it
Wrong’, paper presented at the conference ‘Can’t Vote, Won’t Vote: Are the Media to
Blame for Political Disengagement?’, Goldsmiths College London, 6 November 2003.
impact on voter perception of governmental competence and on the
morale of party supporters. Benefiting from a relationship with the
press based on accommodation and exchange, Blair rarely if ever had to
deal with the concentrated, negative attack journalism which was so
much a feature of Kinnock’s period as leader of the Labour Party
between 1983 and 1992.
In contrast, the critical focus on media management in the political
reporting of the press and broadcasting brought the Blair premiership
into disrepute. Moreover, this critique was by no means just confined to
the published output of political commentators43 or former media advisers44 from the ‘Westminster village’. More worryingly for Blair, fictionalised accounts of New Labour’s obsession with ‘spin’ and ‘control
freakery’ became part of popular culture through television comedy programmes and Rory Bremner’s satirical impersonations. In addition, the
media management activities of Blair’s New Labour contributed to a
sense of public unease and even cynicism about the political process in
contemporary Britain. While the media themselves are sometimes held
responsible for this sense of voter mistrust in politics,45 a healthy public
sphere cannot be delivered by the news media acting alone. Blair and
Campbell must assume some of the responsibility for the critical state of
public communication in Britain, particularly evident during Blair’s
second term in office.
The departure of Campbell and the much less high-profile role
adopted by Hill took some of the heat out of the government’s relations
with the media, especially after the 2005 election. Policy successes such as
the conclusion of the Northern Ireland peace agreement in 2007 even
allowed the Prime Minister moments of favourable media coverage in his
abbreviated third term. Yet while Blair’s relations with the media after
New Labour’s third successive election victory were never as acrimonious
as they had been during his second term, this was in part because much of
the media had already consigned him to the history books. The dominant
media story on Blair after the 2005 election focused on speculation about
the precise date of his departure from office. Ironically for a politician so
concerned with media management, Blair totally mishandled the mediatisation of his exit from No. 10 by giving journalists premature notice of
his decision to quit. As a result, Blair’s final months in office were marked
43 Nicholas Jones, The Control Freaks (London: Politico’s, 2001).
44 Lance Price, The Spin Doctor’s Diary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005).
45 John Lloyd, What the Media Are Doing to our Politics (London: Constable, 2004).
by considerable media sniping regarding his obsession with his legacy,
as well as by speculation about the nature of a future Brown premiership.
In the fast-moving world of contemporary journalism, the concern to
cover the next breaking story meant that in media terms the Blair era was
effectively over well before he vacated No. 10.
8
Tony Blair as Labour Party Leader
Tony Blair’s leadership style was early on encapsulated by his boast,
when leader of the opposition, that he ‘led’ his party while John Major
‘followed’ his. That observation, intended as an attack on Major’s premiership, was a clear portent of the way Blair would operate, within the
party and in government. Labour backbenchers cheered Blair’s attack to
the echo, but many came later to rue his leading Labour from the front,
centring the party on his personal appeal and challenging its traditions
whenever he considered it necessary to d
o so. This approach, for good
or ill, has become the template for the modern and successful party
leader. If Blair modelled himself on the popular perception of Margaret
Thatcher, then David Cameron, Conservative leader since 2005,
has clearly modelled his leadership style on Tony Blair. Cameron has
endlessly emphasised his tough, uncompromising leadership, criticising
Conservatism for being out of touch (‘old’ Conservatism) and his claim,
‘I lead. I don’t follow my party; I lead them’,1 was taken straight from the
Blair playbook.
A 2007 report by the Labour Commission, an unofficial group of
‘broadly representative’ party members, criticised Labour for being a
‘command party’ where ‘the leadership appoints ministers, controls parliament, manages the party and consults members’.2 New Labour, largely
the creation of Blair and likeminded colleagues, foremost among them
Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, sought always
to keep the Labour Party on a tight rein. Being ‘tiny in number . . . more
a junta who had executed a coup’,3 the Blairites (and their Brownite allies)
11 BBC News, ‘Cameron Steps Up Grammar’s Attack’, 22 May 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
2/hi/uk_news/politics/6679005.stm.
12 LabOUR, ‘Renewal: A Two Way Process for the Twenty First Century’, http://
savethelabourparty.org/07_Interim_Report.pdf.
13 Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour (London:
Penguin, 2000), p. xiv.
ran the party after 1994, in the words of Blair’s strategist, Philip Gould, by
replacing ‘competing existing structures with a single chain of command
leading directly to the leader of the party . . . [and by having] one ultimate source of campaigning authority . . . the leader’.4 Blair built on Neil
Kinnock’s reforms to further reinvent Labour’s programmatic appeal. He
did so in acknowledgement of the far-reaching changes brought about by
the Thatcher and Major governments. Blair thus obliged a chastened,
weakened party to recognise that winning was the only objective, and that
electoral salvation lay in Labour moderating its appeal and embracing
neo-liberal economics. Labour’s 1997 and 2005 parliamentary majorities, the largest won by any party since 1935, owed much to Blair’s ability
to modernise his party and fashion a broad coalition attracting support
well beyond Labour’s core vote.
Blair, at his peak, was both a dominant party leader and a predominant Prime Minister. While lacking, say, the wider political impact of a
Margaret Thatcher, he enormously impacted the electoral standing,
programmatic objectives and, most significantly, the political direction
of the Labour Party. He also changed many of the ways in which
government is conducted, not least how the modern prime minister
operates within Whitehall, Westminster and the wider political world.
Excepting Margaret Thatcher, Blair was the longest consecutively
serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool and the longest-serving
Labour prime minister. Harold Wilson might also have led Labour to
four election victories, but he won three only narrowly and lost another
he was widely expected to win. Before Blair’s 1997 and 2001 landslides
Labour had only ever won two sizeable parliamentary majorities, in
1945 and 1966. Under Blair, Labour, in peril of becoming defunct in
1983, and thought by some to have become a permanent second party
in 1992, was transformed from a four-times loser into a three-times
winner. Facing five Conservative leaders – John Major, William Hague,
Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Howard and David Cameron – Blair easily
electorally outpaced the first four. Thanks in large part to him, three
leaders – Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard – became the first
Conservative leaders since Austin Chamberlain never to reach Downing
Street. Labour’s electoral success, whatever the party’s future electoral
standing, is the greatest contribution Blair made to his party as its
leader.
14 Philip Gould, The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party
(London: Little, Brown, 1998), pp. 240–1.
Blair-led Labour and the party system
The 1945–70 Westminster party system, the era of two-party majoritarianism when Labour and the Conservatives won some 90% of the vote
between them, is long dead. The post-1974 period saw the emergence
of a ‘two-party-plus others’ system, as other parties emerged (and
re-emerged), most obviously the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessor parties, the Liberals and the SDP). This system fragmented
further after 1992. Different distinct party systems emerged in Scotland
and Wales through elections to the Scottish Parliament and the
Welsh Assembly conducted under the Additional Member System
(AMS). Labour, in addition to AMS in Scotland and Wales, introduced
party list PR in elections to the European Parliament and the supplementary vote in the London Assembly (while Labour in Scotland introduced the single transferable vote in Scottish local elections), but
Tony Blair’s brief flirtation with electoral reform for the House of
Commons ended in 1998–9, when the findings of the Jenkins
Commission were kicked into touch. Electors might cast their votes more
widely than Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats in
second-order elections to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly
and European Parliament, but at Westminster it is still Labour or the
Conservatives under single-member plurality who remain more likely to
form a single-party government. This may in time be reformed by a
future hung parliament and a coalition government in which the Liberal
Democrats are able to leverage electoral reform from either Labour or the
Conservatives.
Blair – largely the agent of Labour’s electoral good fortune in 1997,
2001 and, less so, 2005 – has been a spectator of electoral (as opposed to
political) realignments as much as he has participated in them. The scale
of Labour’s victory in 1997 put paid to any intention he might have had to
form a coalition government with the Ashdown-led Liberal Democrats,
something reinforced by the Liberal Democrats’ subsequent drift leftwards under Ashdown’s successor, Charles Kennedy. After 1997 Labour’s
post-socialist and pro-market policy record reflected the fact that ideological differences between the parties have narrowed significantly. Amid
Labour’s rise and the Conservatives’ collapse, the Liberal Democrats
consolidated their position as the third party in the House of Commons.
After 1994, as it colonised the centre, Labour was flanked by the
Conservatives (and the BNP) to its right, but found the Liberal
Democrats, the SNP and Plaid Cymru on its programmatic left, together
with the much less numerous Greens and, eventually, the minuscule
far-left grouping, Respect. Of course, with the reviving Cameron-led
Conservatives now heading leftwards (and elements in post-Blair Labour
likely to urge Gordon Brown to tilt left too), it remains to be seen if these
party positions persist. Blair-led Labour, by moving to the political right,
undoubtedly helped further reform the British party system. It has provided the circumstances in which, in Westminster terms, the system may
subsequently change further. Such change may well be likely, particularly
when the ‘coexistence of plurality rule and PR elections is progressively
accentuating and accelerating the transformation of both voters’ alignments and parties’ strategies’.5 It is, however, presently too strong a claim
to suggest, as Patrick Dunleavy does, that voters for the House of
Commons ‘support a multiplicity of parties’ for governmental office even
if they may be ‘disillusioned with the grip of an artificially maintained
“two-party” politics’.6
Blair’s premiership witnessed a precipitous decline in British electoral
turnout, which, against a post-war average of 75%, dropped to 59% in
2001 and 61% in 2005. Electors who continue to vote are more conditional in their support for political parties than previously. Such conditionality explains (and is explained by) ongoing falls in levels of partisan
identification. It reflects (and further encourages) the contemporary
electoral challenges that parties face. As a result, British political parties
find themselves adrift from previously established electoral moorings. As
ties of attachment binding electors to parties become looser, electoral
behaviour becomes more volatile and parties scramble for votes in new
and innovate ways. Tony Blair’s leadership style and his programmatic
appeal owed much to his perception of the electoral phenomena that followed from this: first, changes in established electorates of belonging
from which parties draw support; and second, the rise of judgemental
voting which obliges parties to pay ever closer attention to leaders, images
and issues. Blair grasped that parties now have to compete with one
another by convincing an ever more sceptical electorate that they have a
more attractive set of leading politicians and policies than their opponents. Blair and his boosters therefore offered the Blair leadership as the
solution, given a free hand, to Labour’s interrelated electoral and political