5. The Evolution of Political Campaigning - with Professor Darren Lilleker

Ever wonder how political campaigns have transformed over the years?

Discover how political marketing has embraced corporate strategies, as we analyse the image management and PR tactics of iconic leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Learn about how the introduction of television altered politicians' presentations and the roles played by public relations experts like Tim Bell in shaping campaigns.

Finally, we explore the professionalisation of modern political campaigns and ponder the future of this ever-changing landscape, including the greater use of voter profiling and data-driven campaigns.

For an overview of the air war:

Rosenbaum, M. (2016). From soapbox to soundbite: Party political campaigning in Britain since 1945. Springer.

Developments in the ground war in the later years are documented in:

Denver, D., & Hands, G. (2013). Modern constituency electioneering: Local campaigning in the 1992 general election. Routledge.

One of the best studies of the influences of marketing and public relations is:

Scammell, M. (2016). Designer politics: How elections are won. Springer.

For an overview of the psychology of campaigning see:

Lilleker, D. (2014). Political Communication and Cognition. Springer.

Finally,  a work on spin and New Labour from an ex-BBC journalist:

Jones, N. (2000). Sultans of spin: the media and the New Labour government Orion Books.

Transcript

Harry: 0:00

Welcome to the Modern British Political History podcast. So I'm Harry White, so today I'm joined by Professor Darren Lilleker, who is a researcher in political communication at Bournemouth University. Welcome to the podcast, darren. Thank you very much. Great to be here. It would be great if you could talk a little bit about what your research focuses on.

Darren: 0:22

Well, i've been researching, i suppose since the late 90s, and got interested in political marketing And I think the rise of Tony Blair was interesting because he did things quite differently And talk a little bit about that later Then until I suppose digital campaigning, as we call it now, it was, you know, the use of websites and email originally. More is perhaps now with the way that people engage with campaigns and so how people think about campaigning, how people respond to messages and to what extent they feel that campaign messages resonate with them and they can trust people. So I think they're the more modern issues.

Harry: 1:07

Fantastic. I'm looking forward to getting into some of that. definitely To start off with first principles. So what do we mean when we actually say the word campaigning?

Darren: 1:16

Well, campaigning is, i suppose, the most central aspect of a democracy because it is the point where choices are presented to voters And there's always been a debate whether they should be informative or persuasive, and what the right balance is. Should parties just go out and say this is what we promised to do, or should it be loaded and persuasive? And I think the early part of the era where we're talking about the immediate post-war period it was much more about informing voters, about saying what we're going to do. Now it's a lot more tilted towards persuading, making politics almost a lifestyle choice, where it fits into your psychology and it's trying to press the right buttons to make you respond in a certain way. But fundamentally it's about presenting choices and ensuring people vote for the group they feel would do the best for them. That takes a whole range of questions about ideology and personalities and all of those, but fundamentally about making that choice.

Harry: 2:25

What were some of the main campaigning approaches immediately post-World War II? So, thinking in about the 40s and 50s and I'm thinking both on the ground war it might be good to get a definition of what we mean by that and also the air war and get a bit of a sense of what we mean by that.

Darren: 2:44

OK, yeah, the 1940s was a really interesting period because it just coming on the back of the Second World War. There was a change of government And so what happened is that on the air war, as we say, that's the use of mass media, which at the time was very limited and a lot of newspapers were reluctant to carry too much partisan material. But you would have these statements being produced for the media. You would have, obviously, radio and party leaders being questioned, prime ministers and I suppose particularly with them that first election 45, clement Attlee would have had all the exposure on Pathé news, as well as Churchill. So they were the main ways in which to get across the voter in that time and it was quite limited in that respect And about informing people when they could. And then there was the ground war. This is basically in the constituencies and the local candidate and the local party, and they usually did have quite a strong and active local party in the 40s and through the 50s and beyond, up to around the 70s, there was a big local party on hand and they would go around, the local activists would be sending out leaflets and the candidates would be going to see as many people as possible And there were some wonderful stories of the kind of the amateurish but in a way very effective ways in which they worked.

Darren: 4:24

There was one it became an MP later but he was quite a young kid in the 1940s And he was wandering around with a local candidate and he'd go down the back alleys of the big terraces in Midland cities banging the old metal dustbin lids together. All the dogs would start barking, people would come out and at the end of the alley the candidate would stand in the box and start talking to them. And now I have your attention, listen to me, kind of thing. Also wonderful story of a 1945 elected MP in Gateshead who tried to visit as many people as possible and he was aware he was not the best looking guy and he wasn't from the area. His background was Finnish and he'd worked for the League of Nations and all these sort of grand jobs and now standing as a Labour candidate And going around and he remembers himself on the floor with him because he wouldn't take his dad's seat.

Darren: 5:19

You know that was the old working class lounge where the dad had a seat, the mum had a seat, the kids sat on the floor and he joined the kid on the floor, he'd go. I don't know, i'm a guest in your house, i'll sit down here and talk to them. And I think a lot of that was trying to make those connections with people. And that's what the grand war, i guess, has always been about to some extent of trying to make that connection and reinforce what the national message is. We are the party and we're going to represent you in this way, but this is what I'm going to do locally and this is how it's going to benefit you locally.

Harry: 5:56

Interesting and it's hard not to feel quite nostalgic about that kind of quite traditional approach to campaigning, free of all social media and other things that I'm sure we're going to come on to, moving forward at a step. What were some of the changes that you started to see after that period? So, thinking from the 50s to the 80s? what are the big changes in campaigning methods, and maybe you'll also have politicians themselves related to campaigning?

Darren: 6:29

Yeah, i mean the 50s onwards. One thing that I mentioned with the earlier period was posters. They were used a lot more And what you saw from the 1950s onwards and in television was the massive game changer for campaigning. And this idea of the visual and aesthetics was something that had been around Herbert Morrison when he was, i guess, the equivalent of a Labour mayor now, but he was, you know, head of the council in London He broke the ground in using quite visual and striking posters. Interestingly, he was Peter Mandelson's grandfather, i believe.

Darren: 7:05

But yeah, within this period it was recognised that people need to get their message across better And television opened this opportunity for really sort of reaching voters and being in their lives in a different way than was previously the case, particularly for the party leaders who were always these remote figures, voice on the radio, but now they could be seen on television. And 1959 was kind of one of those watershed moments because you had this very, very professional newsroom style set up. But this was designed by Tony Ben, who quite a famous politician, and he had these quite much younger people around him and selling the party in this kind of newsroom set up where one MP was there being the newsreader reading out these sort of social problems and Ben would do his bit and these various different characters would sort of present there. But it was about six or seven minutes It was ridiculously long now for a party to broadcast But it showed the way of doing something that was quite different and a way of presenting a message in a way that politicians don't normally do, that They are interviewed by interviewers but they're not presenting it as a news program, and there was a number of attempts at trying to create these adverts that now seem very amateurish and excruciating, but at the time this was a groundbreaking way of doing it. There was one liberal leader, jeremy Thorpe was interviewed by Jimmy Saville And it's available to see on YouTube.

Darren: 8:53

It's not the most comfortable viewing at times because it is a little bit awkward, but the idea at the time is having this celebrity, who at the time was a national treasure in his own right, asking these very, very soft questions to a leader and the leader explaining how they would do things for the country And a number of examples of those kinds of personalized, biopic type of things that were taking place. There was official interviews as well. Many older listeners will remember Robin Day who had this very well-educated delivery And he always wears his bow tie and, with due respect, minister or prime minister and very deferential but really interesting interviews where he would really tease out some of the issues. And I guess they're the precursor to the current kind of debates where somebody like Andrew Neal or, in his heyday, jeremy Paxman would interview the leaders all separately. Those are the things carried on And that style remains. It's just a little bit less deferential But these really changed the way that politics was done, because people could get a sense of who the person was And that's parasocial relationship you can build with a party leader was formed around that time And I think that kind of focus on the visuals, which went beyond just the party logo sometimes and the name went down to the ground level as well And many MPs in that time were keen to present themselves not just as the face of a person in a suit.

Darren: 10:32

But there was one man who was unmarried and borrowed his sister and his nephew I think it was for a little picture in a normal suburban house, not the. He lived in quite a rural cottage which wasn't the constituency he was standing in, but he wanted to be seen in the constituency and with a family, to give that impression that he was the same as any other man who would be voting for him in his case. And I think television was something that brought that in the way that politicians were looking at celebrities and TV personalities and the affection there was for them and saying, right, okay, how do we use this tool? How do we get our faces in front of a camera and build those same relationships with people that the celebrities have On?

Harry: 11:24

that, do you get boom? do you think a change to the type of politicians that start to come through with that change in the medium? So I'm thinking of Howard Wilson as someone who, and Tony Bennett as well, were known as good performers, i think on TV, but someone like Clement Attlee, who was very successful, probably wouldn't be seen as a great television politician. So do you think the medium changed the man, as it were? all women as it might be, but probably mostly men then who were running.

Darren: 12:02

I think they had to think about their image more. Clement Attlee, who was famous for brushing off journalists and not saying anything and not liking to be talked to, just couldn't have got away with that. And I think that perhaps different characters came into politics and rose to the top because they had those skills And it was those things that you could have. So good back room people and good front room people And those people who performed well in the front of the camera, their colleagues would recognize them and say, yeah, here's someone who can perform, so we'll push that person forward. I think in a way that famous Blair Brown choice I think that was part of it And Brown perhaps recognized his deficiencies in 92, 93.

Harry: 12:51

I heard someone describe Brown as an analog politician in the digital age, or words that effect which really stuck with me.

Darren: 12:59

Yeah, and I think in a way he was a pre-television politician in the television age in a way, but I don't think he was really comfortable with presenting himself as a person. His persona was always the politician, a very serious person And thinking much someone like Harold Wilson. he was somebody who would like to have a laugh and a joke. He liked to be interviewed by someone like Parkinson, which was primetime viewing, but he'd also go on and perform with Parkinson and the be that to and throw with them. He actually had his own chat show in the late 70s after he stepped down as prime minister.

Harry: 13:41

You had Dennis Leely as well, didn't you, who appeared on more casual viewing type shows rather than high political shows? Didn't he do some musical performance? I seem to remember on one program.

Darren: 13:58

I think he was part of the song and dance group that Malcolm and Wise put together, i have a feeling. But no, he did, and of course Ted Heath as well. It wasn't quite as avuncular as Harold Wilson, have that sort of down to earth character, but his musicianship skills he'd go on to programs and play, and also his sailing. So that was a kind of a celebrity to him for his success on the water. And I think both of them exploited their different qualities very well in that late 60s into the 70s period where they had something to talk about. That wasn't just politics and the policies and the problems with the EEC or all those sort of things, but it gave them also a way of connecting to people where those issues don't always connect. They do their bits, which is a little bit light, but then when they have to do a serious bit people have warmed a little bit more.

Harry: 15:04

So we talked a little bit about the ground war and we talked a bit about the air war, didn't we? One thing I don't think we mentioned was the phone and the growth of people having phones in their houses. Was that a part of campaigning? at the time people were actually ringing up people's houses Or was it still?

Darren: 15:23

door to door canvassing Was the main I'm not aware of any parties using phone marketing in the UK right through, really until the probably through to the 90s.

Harry: 15:36

I guess there's a British barrier of you shouldn't really call me at my home. It's particularly about politics.

Darren: 15:44

I think that's true. I always think that some cold calling had a little bit of a bad name with those sorts of things. I guess within the local party networks people would call up asking for help, but I guess they knew each other already to do that. But I'm not aware of any of the kind of the phone banking things that have been utilized in recent years And you know, getting people to call their friends and family and all of those kinds of things that go on. That was much later And I think part of that kind of marketization where it's every vote matters and we're going to pursue them.

Darren: 16:17

But the one thing in that era and as a kind of a context in the background, you know, apart from having these sort of quite small number of channels, so being on television, if you were on one of the three channels, you'd probably have a reasonably decent audience for that, because there wasn't another hundred channels Netflix and all those things and things to go on. But also the electorate was fairly stable. You didn't have this sort of fluctuations between elections. People didn't shift very much between one party and another. There were those people who hadn't decided there were new voters coming into the system, but there was quite stable and quite loyal electorates going up until really into the 1970s And you had parties with a mass membership So you could get those leaflets delivered quite easily. So it wasn't as much of a struggle to reach voters as it is now. Those kinds of innovations that would have been quite costly at the time, like having a phone bank, weren't things perhaps that parties felt they needed and were worried about.

Harry: 17:25

And what about the big influencers for change from the 50s to the 80s who were holding the torch for some of the new campaigning methods?

Darren: 17:38

I think within the parties and people like Tony Ben, who probably many people will think of as being, you know, sort of an old man on the socialist, and he was very innovative in the Labour Party and probably impacted a great deal also on the Conservatives, because of course the parties watched one another, but perhaps in the 1970s that the person who really grabbed the idea of the image was Margaret Thatcher and through her Tim Bell Thatcher. She struggled to get a seat. Originally anyone would see in the, the movie of her life, a woman going around these Conservative associations trying to look for a seat and being slightly radical about her politics was not welcomed And she was very concerned that the country wouldn't accept a woman Prime Minister And worked with Tim Bell on her look on how she dressed but also how she spoke. There's very few early interviews or sort of conference speeches. I haven't seen any, but there was one on record who said that she was trying to build up pace during the conference speech. Her voice would get higher And there was that danger that if this was televised she'd be seen as a hysterical woman. That is clipped from the conference speech. So one thing that Tim Bell worked with her on is how to deliver a speech in a lower register Keep the momentum, keep the force behind what you're saying, but not go up a key Become operatic. So in a way she was a real pioneer in the way that this sort of the team around gate school in Labour were for producing these sort of shorter but more professional adverts.

Darren: 19:34

Thatcher and her team are much more about the image and probably much more geared to the television age going into the 80s, that most people by that point had colour television. Part of that was what colour suit should the primers to wear and to what occasions, and those kind of things of way are only on camera for a short amount of time. How do you say something? What do you wear? How should you look?

Darren: 20:02

That was something that became a lot more important, i think, particularly because television started to contract the amount of time they would devote to something. You could see a party conference, but it was sometime locked away in the daytime but a little bit on the news. That's the era of the soundbites starting, and I think that's where Bell and his team and I'm not saying that every time Margaret Thatcher got it right, but the lessons he brought into that were really important, particularly when we think of the more marketised politics of Tony Blair. Lessons he directly took from Thatcher and the way that team worked and the way they thought about all the little elements of that was really important.

Harry: 20:47

On photography, was there a bit of a growth? Presumably there was an ongoing growth in the amount of cameras in the UK, so personal cameras, was that a factor of needing to always be on point, always needing to be perfectly prepared, and it seems like Margaret Thatcher had an ability to do that That partly due to the fact that there was just a greater chance of being photographed at any given moment.

Darren: 21:18

I'm not sure there was many people taking photographs that would then go public, but journalists definitely. And yeah, i guess this of the late 70s was the start of the paparazzi and people who were professional photojournalists, without denigrating them, but yeah, statue would often get out of the car and you could see all the flashlights going off behind her, how she looked as she got out of that car, what she was wearing, what she was going to say, what she wanted the headline to be was things that were really important And, i think, became more and more important And there was a, i think, a whole degree of being seen as always being the prime minister for someone like Thatcher. But there was a little bit of a an opportunity to see in the back story. I don't remember the. There was a short documentary done which was a sort of a looking into her life as the, as a housewife as well as being the prime minister, and her with the children who were that young, but it was during the start of her career And I think she tried to epitomize that image which which, in a way, to think of the soap operas at the time Annie Walker and Bette Lynch and characters like that.

Darren: 22:29

You know this kind of strong woman that that doesn't necessarily need a man, she'll have a husband, but she's the boss. She kind of epitomized that, that image which I think actually appealed in a lot of working class communities not necessarily the mining communities, we know the history of that But within those communities that looked at at her and is she credible? Oh yeah, actually she's got that character. She's got that way about her that that says I'm in charge and I'm not taking any rubbish from anybody. And she really perfected that. And very difficult to ever rile her on camera. And I think that was something she learned with this sort of being controlled and keeping control of emotions, control the tone of voice, control of the look. She was very good at controlling herself in those situations.

Harry: 23:22

And what about photo shoots on site, because that's something I really associate with thatcher is the image of her, for example, on a construction site and actually getting directly involved with whatever activity it was. Digging or in a factory would actually start to get involved with assembling something on the line with employees. Was that a new method, or was she developing something into a kind of art form? What was she doing there?

Darren: 23:53

Well, i think it's something that slowly evolved. Prime ministers, particularly, have always wanted to be seen to be active, and being sat on the desk with your red box and a pen is not, is not active. So if something opens, if they built a new hospital, they will be there, and there's so many shots in the 1940s of where it's it's the NHS, it's a Narin Bevin, it's Ernie Bevin at shipyards and things like that and Clement Attlee looking at going around the nation, new towns or new bills, and so when something was open or once we were being built, they were there inspecting it, probably getting in the way, as politicians often do in the term things. It's getting out there, and I think that slowly evolved to this position where you know and I don't I wouldn't like to say that you never saw Ted Heath or Harold Wilson in the hard hats or something on a building site.

Darren: 24:52

But I think, maybe because of Margaret Thatcher's longevity in the role, maybe because she did a lot more for colour television and maybe because there was that there was a lot of investment in certain areas, definitely a lot of building up to that activity. She had these opportunities and she loved going out and talking to people and she was very good at that, very good at the responses as well, and yeah, so I think that she probably perfected it more and understood that idea of being out there and connecting with people and being seen to be connecting with people and that it would make news. And, of course, as a Prime Minister, you have this great advantage that you have the four or five years between the elections when you are the sole producer of everything, so you go out and do all the visits, you go out and say I made this happen, and so I think she exploited that a great deal. I guess also, she could decide right, you can take a photograph now, and I could imagine her doing it as well, demanding now's the time you take the photograph.

Harry: 26:01

It's interesting how as well something that is innovative at one moment then starts to seem cliched further down the line. So I'm thinking of the politician in the hard hat wandering around the construction site. It sounds like in the 40s that probably seemed quite a modern tactic. But then you get to more recent history and it's something that satirized quite heavily and something like the thick of it. Like you said, politician getting in the way, sort of thing. So there you go. But I was going to ask about Tim Bell as well, because you mentioned him. So I don't know much about him. I guess he's someone a bit more behind the scenes. Was he in developing these tactics?

Darren: 26:39

Absolutely. Yeah, he was a public relations man. He was purely in promotions And, yeah, i guess he was one of those people who had been adapting to television, working with clients, both celebrities and business clients This is how you use a camera and moved into politics perhaps because of an affinity with the party, and that's quite normal, but also because of here's an interesting job, here's somebody interesting to work with. He was probably one of the first that was quite famous in that respect for doing a job in politics And of course, it then benefited his corporate world.

Darren: 27:32

I think he's so well as his company definitely still is, bell Pottinger public relations and very big and very well respected, and perhaps you know, in part due to the work he was doing with that It's something that's very visible. That isn't always the case with the PR world. You are behind the scenes, But when you say, you know this was one of my clients and he did write about it a bit later on in his career, but I'm sure it did in no harm whatsoever and probably got him quite a lot of clients around those businesses that were booming around that time.

Harry: 28:08

Can you bring us up to date or closer up to date now? So we were in the 80s. We've had Margaret Thatcher, some growth in new approaches, i suppose, to campaigning. Can you walk us through the 90s and up to maybe the mid 2000s, which I guess is taking us through new labor, isn't it Tell? us a little bit about that.

Darren: 28:30

So, yeah, the ground war, the boots on the ground thing didn't really change. Ok, nobody was banging dustbin lids around, but door to door is important. But the local party organizations shrunk quite considerably. There weren't as many activists around. But data came in And so not only their own records. When they're gone door to door, how do you vote? all of those kinds of data you can pick up but also data being pulled in. Particularly in the late 90s with Blair, they were using quite sophisticated marketing data that suggested the sort of people who may normally have voted conservative but were no longer happy with the conservatives under major and so would flip, and that data was really important for targeting. And that's where some of the phone canvassing came in, where big phone banks were opened and also local people were targeted at certain houses and places to go and you've got to go and talk to this person. It was a lot more data driven. You wouldn't have always people walking down one street and going to every house. Everyone may get a leaflet, but that was organized usually through the post, but then you'd have specific houses where people were targeted. If somebody moved in just before an election, that address was flagged up. We need to go and talk to that person to find out who they are. So that made a big impact And also the strategy of the safe seats and the marginal seats In certain areas.

Darren: 30:07

In 1997, i was living in Wakefield I did not witness a grand campaign, that was safe labor. If I'd probably been living here in Bournemouth at the time I wouldn't have witnessed a campaign because this was safe, conservative. But there were seats across the country where Blair, the top team, were there all the time. One day a week There'd be in these various seats floating backwards and forwards. Being in the local media You saw this very kind of imbalanced campaign really, that some people wouldn't have a campaign, the other ones would be. Just every time they opened the door they'd fall over a candidate. So that was quite a change and reflected the sort of changing time and the weakening loyalties to parties And this idea of the floating voter being bigger and bigger.

Darren: 31:00

In terms of the air war and just the television side of it, there was television's interest in politics a little bit contracted. So news featured politics but people weren't always watching news as much. There were more channels available not as many in the 90s, but still more channels available. You could skip around and miss the news out And so trying to get into soft television.

Darren: 31:28

So a bit like Harold Wilson and Ted Heath going on Parkinson the 70s, tony Blair was interviewed, i think, by Dezo Connor and Russell Hardy in the run-up to the 1907 election Big names in their time and going on to their chat shows and doing quite well on those chat shows. He was quite a natural performer and quite comfortable in talking on camera without really focusing on the fact that oh God, there's a camera on me, which perhaps the Gordon Brown problem. There's a camera, i need to do something about it, which is often fatal. And even before him, one of those wonderful memories was Neil Kinnick appearing in a pop video with Tracy Orman.

Darren: 32:11

But trying to get around that, finding a way to reach out to people where you weren't just a politician, remained really important. And in that gap, as the space for politicians to appear on television contracted and the web social media, youtube opened up, politicians were really looking for opportunities of how do I reach people? And some were able to get onto these programs much better than others. I think the last politician I am aware of going on a chat show was Ian Duncan Smith Talking to Johnny Vaughan on his kind of ill-fated late night chat show. But that's 2003-ish. I cannot imagine a politician going onto the modern chat shows with Graham Norton or someone like that, which would give them the exposure, but they wouldn't be the guests that they're looking for.

Harry: 33:04

With new labor. that word spin is the one that is associated with it a lot And was it the case during campaigning that there really was a greater use of advisors using the media as part of their campaign, essentially trying to get positive headlines? Or was it the case that actually that was going on much the same as before And it just was something that people became more aware of or more attention was drawn to it?

Darren: 33:39

I think more attention was drawn to it, but it wasn't really unique how Wilson and Ted Heath were chasing newspapers And, of course, patrick. Again she had Bernard Ingem, who was a real master at both burying bad news, usually by churning out loads and loads of material. But now that these things weren't necessarily new, it was perhaps done a little bit more tautisously. But I think Bernard Ingem paid the way for that of somebody who moved from journalism into the civil service Really good grasp of how politics worked, how the media worked, and then going into government and always being there alongside the communications team during the election campaigns as well. I think it became more prominent mainly because of Alistair Campbell as a character. He became a little bit too abrasive with certain journalists, which then made him the story. And it's always that thing of if the relationship breaks down, so I'm going to write, i'm not happy about that And so I'm going to tell this story. And so suddenly Alistair Campbell became famous for being the spin doctor that was trying to control things. But I'm not sure he did a huge amount more than Bernard Ingem when it came to the spin side of things. He just was absolutely a bit more aggressively excluding some journalists, whereas Ingem did it in a very quieter but no less forceful way.

Darren: 35:16

Ingem was quite a character. I saw him speak even I think it was in his 80s when he spoke And you could still see him as somebody who would be listened to. that he had a way of delivery And as such, his team were quite something in that He commanded respect from people when he said something And he was very clear about this is how you deliver something. It was the classic, as a colleague of mine, peter Van Elstes, as a waltz two equal partners waltzing. Sometimes one is leading, sometimes the other is leading. The journalist has a story, the politician has a story. We work together on it. I think they were complicit in that game in the Ingem period but started to push back against Campbell And then suddenly that whole idea of spin became a big issue. It's a scandal at the heart of politics, but possibly just because it was more the way it was done.

Harry: 36:08

And the other thing that you associate with the Blair era, or many do, is focus groups, our focus groups And I'll put my own take on this and test it with you and see what you think which is you talked about the kind of campaigns being informative or persuasive, and with focus groups it almost seems like there's another category where it's about finding the voters that are already quite closely associated with your views, or at least persuadable, i suppose. So I guess maybe it does come into that bucket persuasive and targeting your messaging quite specifically at them, or trying to at least get all, get them out to vote if they're onside but not motivated. So how did focus groups play a role?

Darren: 36:56

When Blair became leader of Labour and looking at the 1997 election and could we win, bit like Thatcher, there was a nervousness around new Labour of, yes, major isn't doing very well in the polls, but can we beat him? Can we win the voters' trust? And Philip Gould, who was very much a Labour supporter, had worked with the party before but also worked in marketing, started to do research And it's in his book, it's almost. he was working independently of the party and then started working closely with the party and giving them data. But what he looked for were people who were disillusioned with the Conservative Party and the Major were looking for an alternative and really finding out what they wanted to hear. So there were symbolic acts like the ditching of clause four quite early in the time of the Labour, that making the rose pink rather than red to tone down their links with communism or whatever The sort of accusations could be. But also find the messages that resonated and trying to find these sort of average people out there who were susceptible to Labour's message And that's not necessarily saying it's that susceptible in a negative way that they can be manipulated, but people who are looking for a party to vote for. they're looking for a political home and they don't feel they had one under Kinect's Labour or Major's Conservatives. And so what does Blair need to do to say here is your home, here is the big tent you belong to, which was a phrase that it was used.

Darren: 38:47

It became very powerful for Labour at that time. There is I don't know if it is an apocryphal story or not that they actually had either supermarket dummies or close shop dummies or cutouts at the corner of a room, but the idea of the man was to woman. These were these averages of people that they need to appeal to. And within the communication room, when they were doing a new policy loan show, you know, they were making a promise. they were doing a bit of communication. What would they say? How will they read this? It became very powerful, this idea of these people. you can't scare them off. Everything you say has got to keep them on side. So it was persuasive and it brought something new to politics that hadn't been openly discussed before of how to use these focus groups and how to use data and how to use people's words back to them And, just as the outcome of all of those kinds of things after the Iraq war, tony Blair's masochism strategy, where he went out to mainly lots of largely female groups and allowed them to tell them what they thought of him, and he would then give them these lines back.

Darren: 40:11

why you should trust me. All of that was done in focus groups using the empty chair technique, where you have a chair there and say if Tony Blair was here right now, what would you say to him? And then you flip it and say what do you want to hear from him? And that whole script was then put into his little tour of the country. So it's a very powerful tool. There's many different ways in which this is now used in politics. Focus groups happen quite a lot dial testing. so you'll hear a speech or you'll hear some lines being given and you turn the dial to say whether you like it or hate it, or you feel positive, excited, all of those kinds of things. They're happening in the background of some work. And if you ever wonder why a slogan's been produced, somebody in a focus group probably liked it. It's been done with marketing for years but really only came into politics in the late 90s.

Harry: 41:09

That's fascinating. Particularly I hadn't heard the chair technique, i guess. Again it shows how these things start off as feeling innovative and then can become caricatured or feel to many that they become a part of the problem, almost. So I'm thinking about the focus group approach and thinking again about the thick of it That then become a caricature, that you are forever chasing this slightly mythical voter, essex man, for example, and then almost hollowing out, i suppose, the views that the party holds, because it's just forever in this game. So just an interesting thing to think about. I was wondering it turns us towards that question of psychology, i think a little bit, because you're really trying to get in the heads of voters, aren't you? And the final question I had to you was on how did the understanding of psychology of voters develop over the time we've talked about and how did that impact campaigning?

Darren: 42:12

It's an interesting question because really, until you get to the memoir of Philip Gould and the Finish Revolution that the idea of voters thinking certain ways is very infrequently talked about in politics. It's often behind the scenes and more of a kind of a worry what do they think of us? as opposed to we know what they think. I think that often across the area, politics has always been a little bit behind, and sometimes a lot behind, the corporate world. So there are people who and Tony Bennett was one of them people who know how the corporate world works and how market research works and try to use that to produce something that was innovative and try and think about what voters want to hear, but never considering doing a focus group in that era. And I think, in terms of image management and Tim Bell's work, bringing those rules from public relations, where public relations often think it's thought about as being spin and things like that. But it's about how brands and the people who represent a brand can build a relationship with their consumers And what's the best way of doing that. That depends who you are. If you're a footballer, you can build a relationship on the pitch, but also if you're selling goods, if you're the front of an advertising campaign. Why would they believe you with that? Why would they want to buy that? So those are things that were in the minds of public relations people which then were brought into some of the work that was done with Margaret Thatcher, which was refining the way she did things.

Darren: 44:06

So I think politicians at different times have worried about something, about their image, about the way they do things and try to solve a problem. Often, i think it seems to be who came to them. That it's. I think now it's much more prominent that parties will go out and they'll go to Crosby-Texter, which is Linton Crosby and the sort of famous negative campaign model. Yeah, they'll go to them saying I want you to run our campaign, but in the earlier days it seems it's more people coming along and going. Can I help you with something?

Darren: 44:42

Yeah, and Philip Gould the way he writes his story, it's much more about that. He was looking at how the labor went and then giving some ideas to the party about what you need to be doing. So, yeah, i think it's a lot of the background work that goes on and then, towards the end of this is where the marketing research and the idea of consumer profiling comes into politics. So the idea of consumer profiling if somebody buys these magazines and this sort of products, this is their lifestyle, so this lifestyle is going to reflect be reflected in their ideology and the way they buy and the way they think about goods and brands. That came in towards the end of it Ultimately ended up with Cambridge Analytica and social media algorithms, which are all doing the same job in the background.

Harry: 45:34

And that brings us neatly to the current day, feels quite close to some of what we see in contemporary politics. My final thing I was going to ask was is there anything you think we've missed? maybe that you'd like to touch on before we finish up?

Darren: 45:53

I suppose as a kind of a summary of it all we'll be talking. In literature there's this idea of professionalization which is always a little bit. It assumes an end goal. But I think what we've seen over the last 60, 70 years in politics is evolution evolving around society. Constituencies have gotten bigger, more people in them. People are different to they were in the 1940s. They want to hear different things, they're very different lives And the technology and the way of reaching them is vastly different.

Darren: 46:30

It's interesting so, looking back to that period of, even before the war, stanley Baldwin adopting a radio voice which was very different to the voice he would use normally, and the comment of Sozey his wife didn't recognize him was on the radio. These things have always happened in a way. It's just that now technology is so ubiquitous and there's so many different channels We haven't quite got a Prime Minister mastering TikTok. I'm not sure you ever want to really. But that idea of how can I use this, how can I use the next tool, how can I get the best advantage And who can help me to maximize the potential of this thing to get elected, that's really what professionalization has been about over the years And there's no starting point. There's no end point. It's a constant process where we're adapting to what's going on around us, as I guess we all do in some way.

Harry: 47:23

Yeah, so it'll be, as you said, interesting to see where some of this goes next. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been really fascinating and really lifted the veil on campaigning, which can sometimes be a bit of a mysterious topic, but yeah, i've really enjoyed this conversation. Darren, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Darren: 47:44

My pleasure and I do, And I wait for comments correcting my anecdotes and my memory.

Harry: 47:51

I hope listeners will be forgiving as well, because I think I had a couple of moments where I was pretty confident I was accurate, but not for this.