Posts Tagged ‘labour’

The Treasury team stepped out into the sunshine to announce George Osborne’s raft of cuts which aim to make recovery a sure thing – a wise move, as it’s always easier to disguise bad news in good weather.

There was a fair bit of tough news to swallow all round, but what intrigued me was the way that Osborne deferred to Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury, David Laws, when it came to handing out the truly hard-to-swallow news.

This is where the coaltion comes into its own for the Tories; they have more seats and more cabinet members than the Lib Dems, but they get to share the pain equally. Should these cuts in spending create a double dip recession, as Labour predicted, the Tories will work hard to offload the worst of it onto the shoulders of their coalition colleagues, as they did today.

Finagle’s Law of Dynamic Negatives states that ‘anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment!’.

From now on, I suspect, any political instance of this law in action will be known as the ‘Brown Variant’, after unguarded remarks about a woman he had just spoken to on a walkabout were broadcast to the world. He condemned Gillian Duffy as a ‘bigot’ into a radio mic he didn’t realise was still live.

Unsurprisingly, the press have pounced. What is surprising is that this is the first serious gaffe on any side in a flawless, highly polished election campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was 19, the publicist Theo Cowan – this country’s first pro celebrity PR wrangler, who created the Rank Charm School, an acting school run the Rank Film company that brought the world Roger Moore, Joan Collins, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors and more – granted me an audience in Poland Street. “Keep your clients’ feet on the ground,” he told me. “NEVER let someone believe a good review!”

This is advice that needs to be handed on to Nick Clegg, after last night’s second Leaders’ Debate. He appeared to have spent the week following his remarkable showing in the first debate positively wallowing in the good reviews. Certainly his people believed the good press enough to let Clegg give Brown and Cameron enough room to make up lost ground. That said, he survived pretty well mostly thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal allowing too many people to see the puppet strings in this campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

Given that an election tends to exist in a crowded little bubble all of its own and that there are now ever more ways of competing for attention, with iPhone apps, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and the like being utilised by every politico going, journalists are going to have a harder time than ever getting to the heart of the matter – policy – and the election is likely to be run on stunts.

We’ve already had one hysterical moment, with David Cameron turning in a karaoke version of Obama when he rolled up his sleeves yesterday. He may have been trying to look hip, but looked more like the sort of embarrassing school teacher who apes trends remorselessly – two years after they’ve come off the boil. Unlike embarrassing teachers, Cameron made the news. Read the rest of this entry »

There have been weeks and weeks of phony electioneering and, finally, this morning Gordon Brown has told the world what we already knew – the election will be on 6th May.

From the negative electioneering of mashed up, satirical posters, to the dusting down of the old Saatchi creative team – to deliver up what Cameron’s mob hope to be a coup de gras to Labour (as was done under Thatcher) – its been a long and spectacularly phoney war; one that has, alarmingly, only focused on the media process. Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC have, without doubt, handed Nick Griffin and the BNP a potential PR coup by allowing him to appear on Question Time. It is very likely that Griffin will be working desperately hard to avoid belching racist bile, especially as the programme surrounds him – in the interests of the BBC’s “central principle of impartiality” – with Jack Straw (Jewish ancestry and, appropriately, Labour’s Justice secretary), Lady Warsi (Muslim Conservative peer), the critic Bonnie Greer (African American) and token Lib Dem Chris Huhne.

Griffin’s PR nous comes hard earned – the BNP’s Director of Publicity, Mark Collett, has had his share of run-ins with the television, having been caught on camera during Channel 4’s Young, Nazi, and Proud documentary in 2002 declaring his admiration for Adolf Hitler and calling homosexuals “AIDS monkeys” on Russell Brand’s Re:Brand show in the same year. Collett is highly unlikely to want Griffin to fall into the same trap, despite the strong likelihood that he will be mercilessly provoked.

So should we allow a thug in a well-cut suit on the TV to attempt to seduce the masses? Is Griffin likely to raise his status to that of statesman in the circumstances? Prohibition would, I suspect, be more likely to fan the flames of disaffection among voters – who have much to be disaffected about at the moment, hence the 6% who voted BNP in the European elections – and the last thing most people, let alone most politicians, want is to allow them more chances to snare votes.

The hope, then, is that Griffin will succumb to anger and show his dark side, which has been slathered in nice suits and careful spin for the last few years. Gordon Brown has gone on record this morning to say that: “it will be a good opportunity to expose what [the BNP] are about”. Russell Brand has said it with more style in The Sun. According to Brand it will help to let the BNP “gurgle up their chuckle-brained hate-broth” on Question Time. “The right thinking people of the Earth are on relatively safe ground when it comes to the ‘war of words’ with televised bigots,” he adds.

A few years ago Griffin told a meeting of the American Friends of the BNP (which included the then leader of the Ku Klux Klan) that: “Once we’re in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, ‘yes, every last [immigrant] must go’. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you’re not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity.”

With this in mind, I think that Michael Corleone’s advice in The Godfather Part 2 – “Keep you friends close, but your enemies closer” – is the best bet. Let’s keep Griffin and his hateful, hate-full party close and hope that they deliver a horse’s head to their own bed, making it clear just how appalling their views, which they keep simmering under the veneer of careful PR, really are.

Accused of not letting slip any details of policies that would be employed should they form the next Government, the Tories came out in surprisingly brave style yesterday, thanks to George Osborne.

He may have the charisma of a financial director of a small engineering firm in Colchester, but Osborne has been the boldest politician on the block this conference season, playing on the Tories’ current popularity to roll out plans for an austere Britain should the Tories come to power.

“After a year in which trust in parliament has been rocked to the foundations, we know that politics must change forever,” he told the Tory faithful. Then, in a definite nod to both the careful PR husbandry of Andy Coulson, the new Cardinal Richelieu of spin, and the needs of the public, he added: ‘We have to be open and transparent with the people we serve.”

It’s a risk, especially for a Tory party riding its first wave of media support in a long time. Not so long ago the Tories would have been very aware of the media looking carefully at the effect on the public of a group of old Etonians asking country to tighten its belt. But with the Sun on their side, this is the first conference that they are feeling confident at – and Osborne has taken a gamble by asking everyone but the poorest Briton to do exactly that to make sure the country gets out of the huge deficit.

Of course, anyone even paying lip-service to transparency in politics at the moment is likely to do well, however unlikely it is that the transparency will last long after power’s been achieved. Osborne, however, knows full well that he is not likely to end up as unpopular as Gordon Brown, whatever happens. We may have seen huge applause for the prime minister and his wife at the Labour conference last week, but a huge percentage of the people clapping, particularly the Balls and Darlings, are likely to have a dagger with Brown’s name on it concealed about their person. They’re all PR savvy enough to not want to be associated with the sinking of Labour and will be working out ways of leaving Gordon holding the baby.

Talking of hidden daggers, I was at the Pride of Britain awards last night and had the pleasure of watching the popular Piers Morgan working the room with ease, wit and a certain amount of grace. He and his partner, Celia Walden, make a very likeable pair – she’s his Michelle Obama.

I fell to wondering what this popularity could mean for his position in the Simon Cowell empire. Piers is getting to be much more popular than he used to be; will Cowell – the alpha male of the X Factory– allow someone on one of his shows to be this genuinely liked?

It’s time to be vigilant – this has all the makings of an epic off-screen soap opera that could run and run. Keep your eyes peeled for the next thrilling installment, coming soon!

Celebrity death is best done young, or youngish, whilst all the characteristics that enamour the public to them remain intact. It’s not great for the celebrity in question, perhaps, but certain brand-builders love a good image that’s been soused in aspic and preserved for an eternity of milking.

Take Michael Jackson, whose death has seen the worst elements of him shorn away, with only the adulation left; there’s now a competition to design a fitting memorial for him. And of the entries, there’s not one but three suggestions to build a Jackson-shaped island off Dubai, next to the other man made islands. The proposals would, of course, all have theme-parks on them – a home for Neverland ranch, if the new owner feels the need to sell it.

It’s astonishingly gauche, but somehow hardly surprising. I half expect one of the entries to win and then we’ll be able to see a Jackson-shaped landmass from space. What an alien visitor would make of this is another question.

An alien visitor’s reaction to the relentless plundering of Jackson’s brand in the months since his death would make for interesting reading, too. The family started it, with Jackson’s father launching a record label in the wake of his son’s death. The only way from here is to plunder more, until all the contrary mystery that Jackson maintained is gone.

Not that you have to be dead for your brand to be plundered: licensing firm CKX Inc recently bought an 80% stake in the image rights to the great boxer Muhammed Ali, paying around $50 million to use his name, image and likeness of the boxing champ, as he was at the height of his powers, as they see fit. Ali retains 20% of himself in the deal (more, I suspect, than is actually left of the iconic boxing champion in him) as well as taking the money upfront, a shrewd deal for a man who was so badly damaged by boxing, one which guarantees his survival in the collective consciousness.

The same plunder is happening with all sorts of iconic figures of the 20th century, from Marilyn Monroe to Elvis to Che Guevara. Their images have been in use for years, generating awesome amounts of money for the license holders and for the estates of the dead stars, but it will be interesting to see where new technology takes their images – we’ve already seen Laurence Olivier resurrected for theatre and film, but as the technology advances, so will the scope for looting the brands of dead stars. Whole films carried by computer-generated versions of James Dean? A new romcom starring Elvis and Marilyn with a supporting role for Che? The possibilities are terrifyingly endless.

What fun the brand looters could have with Peter Mandelson, who stood up at the Labour conference the other day and completed his resurrection. As Quentin Letts pointed out in the Mail: “There were self-puncturing jokes, swishes of kitten claw and a series of exaggerated waist swivels, arm gesticulations and eye flashes worthy of a Michael Jackson impersonator.”

It leaves me wondering what we would be left with if Mandelson were to shuffle, untimely, off this mortal coil. Preserve him in aspic now and we would have the new, pantomime Machiavelli, the glamorous manipulator, the ultimate in Lazarene politician-kind.

Simply, he is the current brand apotheosis of this type of politics and the standing ovation he received at the Labour conference is as good as any baptism in waves of spin. Now he is free to fight his way to the leadership of the Labour party. I wonder which way the Sun would turn if he was in charge?

That said, I doubt anyone would consider building an island in his honour, should he pass on suddenly. A scale model of the Millennium Dome in a model village somewhere, perhaps, but that’s about it. Which is more than can be said for Gordon Brown, mind you, who, despite a rousing speech at the conference yesterday, has yet to shake off Steve Bell’s branding of him as a rain-cloud. His only hope for long-term brand management is his wife…

The Independent ran an article on the rebranding of Sarah Brown and asked several people their opinion on her efforts, including myself – see the excerpt below. To read the full article, click here.

“The publicist Mark Borkowski, a prolific user of new media, believes that Sarah Brown has shown herself far more adept in this area than her husband could ever hope to be. ‘She is operating in areas where he doesn’t have any hope of generating traction,’ he says. ‘He cannot YouTube, she can. He cannot Twitter, she can. Gordon can’t generate sympathetic votes, she can, particularly from women. They’re trying to turn her into a yin to his yang.’

“Borkowski traces the origins of Sarah Brown’s strategy back to last year’s Labour Party conference in Manchester, when she stepped up to the microphone in defence of her under-attack husband. ‘Some people at the time claimed she needed to be arm-twisted into that but actually it was a bit of a toe in the water to see how it would go.’

“Despite her PR background, it will not have been easy for her. She once said of the Hobsbawm Macaulay way of working: ‘Julia goes out to lunch with people so I don’t have to.’ One industry source recalls that ‘She never really hung out with the PR crowd.’”