It’s a four-letter word with great versatility (verb and noun), yet despite being an innocuous-looking one syllable long, it has unremittingly negative associations. Once most commonly used as a program on the washing machine, the term ‘spin’ now has come to mean all that puts people off politics: deception, deceit and general sleaziness.
There’s nothing wrong with political communication per se. We do courses in it at Kingston University that do well at recruiting students. The runaway sales of Alistair Campbell’s diaries show that the general public wants to read about it. Why then has spin got itself such a bad name?
Spin has been around forever, even if it wasn’t termed as such until the Clinton-Blair years. Accordingly, political parties have always had an uneven relationship with the mass media. Anthony Eden apparently hysterically railed that the BBC was run by communists, Norman Tebbit took a similar line and the Corporation has recently had to apologise to the Tories for showing old film of Redwood ‘miming’ the Welsh national anthem.
Fellow contemporary cuddly lefty Tony Benn was the Peter Mandelson of the 1959 general election. Both assumed spin doctor like status for having previously worked in the media. After the power-dressing shoulder pads of Margaret Thatcher, John Major projected a more modest image; using an upturned crate as platform for speaking nationwide in the 1992 election. More people saw this on television than in the flesh but the stunt delivered a boost for the Tories, confounding pollsters.
Of course those who live by the soundbite can die by it too. In the 1980s Edwina Currie was forced to resign as a minister after a slip-up made not in the Commons but to the media. The feeding frenzy of the media for having claimed the scalp of Major’s one-time lover was reminiscent of a line from one of the Carry On films: ‘Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it infamy.’
One of the few Tory successes of recent years has been to unjustly equate New Labour with spin, whereas in reality New Labour has been a genuine political project of substance rather than arctic photo-op. The ‘Brown bounce’ that has so astonished the Tories is attributable to the fact that, whatever their politics, people tend to regard the new PM as a trustworthy and decent individual. Even the once rabidly anti-Labour Daily Mail has provided distinctly warmer coverage of Prime Minister Brown. The skew-whiff positioned autocue at the launch of his leadership campaign was spun as the end of spin: a crucial advantage in the post Blair political landscape. By contrast, David Cameron’s pre-parliamentary career as political hack and PR spiv looks less and less attractive. Even his one memorable line at PMQs to Blair – ‘you were the future once’ – seems curiously to apply to himself now.
Technology is a great driver of political culture. The cathode ray tube killed the public meeting. Multi-channel television has since seen the main terrestrial channels shrink in stature – it seems unimaginable now that Harold Wilson had Steptoe and Son rescheduled by the BBC for potentially impeding Labour turnout. What news does remain must be in bite-sized chunks, for example Channel 5’s ‘Five Facts’ with constant reminders to stay tuned with the promise of further goodies in store. Fleet Street no longer exists and newspapers must give away all manner of freebies to stay afloat as circulations plummet in the face of free titles and the internet. Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Myspace site was an astute move.
So how does Labour cope with this new media climate? The increasing importance of cabinet as opposed to sofa government under the new administration is welcome. But the recent vote to exclude parliament from Freedom of Information legislation created an overall impression of MPs wriggling out of legislation that the rest of the public sector was subject to. This should be revisited quickly in the interests of openness and transparency.
Moreover, as we’re well into a third term the political terrain the government has to traverse will not always be easy – something that the keepers of collective responsibility need to be aware of. Thoughtless comments like branding 9/11 ‘a good day to bury bad news’ must not be repeated. Whilst prudence has been good to Gordon until now it is imperative that propriety is now the name of the game.