Ed Miliband is not the first progressive politician to be smeared by his opponents. Hopi Sen reports on what Labour can learn from how others have responded
 
The Daily Mail’s attack on Ralph Miliband is a reminder that, in modern politics, almost nothing is off limits. Of course, there is actually nothing new about this. James Gillray, the 18th century father of political caricature, received a secret pension from the Tory government specifically in order to encourage him to pile abuse on the radical opposition. In return, Gillray graphically questioned the morals, motives – and the looks – of leading radical politicians. Few knew that Gillray’s caricatures were paid for by powerful people with a political agenda.

More recently, personal attacks have involved a similar deniability for political candidates who would benefit from them. Whether it was the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, facing the ‘swift boat veterans for truth’ in 2004; the persistent rumours around Barack Obama’s birth certificate; or the phoney ‘phone polls which targeted Christian voters ahead of  South Carolina’s Republican party primary in 2000 asking them whether they would be ‘more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?’, no one was ever able to tie the smears to the opposing candidates.

That the attacks come from a source that apparently had nothing to do with a particular party or candidate matters not at all. What matters is the impression left in the mind of the voter. As the rightwing American activist, Ralph Reed, once said, ‘I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.’

It is in this context that we should place the media attacks on Ed Miliband. On one level, the Daily Mail’s attack on Miliband’s father failed. Every poll has shown that voters felt the paper’s headline, ‘The man who hated Britain’, was outrageous, while Miliband was able to turn it into an appeal for something better – a need for decency and civility in politics. This approach made the Labour leader appear both passionate and personal, and helped him score another victory over the worst excesses of tabloid culture.

So why did the Daily Mail pursue a vendetta so apparently unhelpful to its cause and, having seen it off, can Labour’s media team dismiss it as a failed onslaught? The newspaper’s attack on Miliband comes straight out of the American right’s political playbook, one developed and honed by George W Bush’s former political strategist, Karl Rove. Rove had one unique political manoeuvre. Faced with an opponent with a single overwhelming strength, he worked relentlessly to undermine that strength.

Taken to the extreme, this is ugly, dirty, work. You have to be prepared to argue, as in the case of Kerry, that a war hero is a coward, or that the strong and gutsy Texas governor, Ann Richards, who Bush unseated in 1994, is a front for a lesbian clique. Defeated candidates across the American south tell the same story. Where they were strongest, they were savaged.

So, how does this fit with the attacks on Miliband?  In a presentation at the Conservative party conference, Michael Ashcroft clearly identified the Labour leader’s greatest strength: the perception that he ‘understands ordinary people’.

This perception helps to protect Miliband against Tory attacks. For all the jibes about ‘Wallace’ or ‘weakness’, people see in him  a patently decent man who understands how hard life can be for ordinary people. The Daily Mail’s attack is part of a concerted attempt to replace this with an impression that Miliband is not like ‘the rest of us’, but is different, other. Put together the attacks that have been levelled by the media against Miliband during his leadership and a picture emerges: the son of a Marxist elitist, a child of patronage and privilege, a millionaire tax dodger, an out-of-touch metropolitan leftist, and a hypocrite. However unfair this attack, it would be dangerous to assume it is incapable of working. Ask John Kerry.

The Daily Mail’s story is just the opening salvo in a relentless personal assault on the Labour leader. The attack on Miliband from the right will be akin to that on Kerry. His personal integrity, finances, family, and connections, will all be used to paint a picture of a man who is not ‘like Britain’, with all the insinuation that involves.

Labour should not expect much of this attack to come from the Tories themselves. They will want to stay firmly on their message, while appearing to rise above the fray. Instead, they will confine their role to saying such things as: ‘It’s outrageous to suggest Ed Miliband’s father was a Marxist who hated Britain and it doesn’t matter that Ed Miliband is a privileged son of an extremist academic who is worth several million pounds. We Conservatives will fight on the issues, not such trivia.’ In so doing, they will be taking a leaf firmly out of Richard Nixon’s book of dirty tricks. The former president always made sure to repeat the allegation made against his opponents in the same sentence in which he claimed not to believe it.

You do not have to look across the Atlantic to find examples of what Hillary Clinton once termed ‘the politics of personal destruction’. Think of the opprobrium piled on Neil Kinnock. His passion was portrayed as a lack of self-control, his careful restraint as falseness. We know the Tories sought to portray him as ‘evil’, not least because, in a sweet irony, the campaign plan to do so was leaked in an attempt to smear Shaun Woodward, the Conservative director of communications in 1992, when he defected to the Labour party in 1999.

Twenty years later, people might still remember the election day front page picture of Kinnock’s head in a light bulb with the headline: ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights?’ Less well remembered is the assault that preceded it, episodes like the Sun and the Daily Mail’s headlines about ‘Kinnock pal and the missing £10m’, which dominated the news during the  Monmouth by-election in 1991, or the Sunday Times story about ‘Kinnock’s Kremlin Connection’.

After the 1992 election, Philip Gould, who had been advising  Kinnock and would go on to become Tony Blair’s chief political strategist, travelled to Little Rock, Arkansas to warn Bill Clinton’s campaign that the Republicans were planning to deploy the same corrosive attacks against their candidate which had sunk Labour. As Gould recalled in The Unfinished Revolution, he arrived in Little Rock to find a Washington Post reporter telling a campaign operative that he was working on a story that the Democrat presidential candidate was a KGB spy, the result of attempts by the Republicans to put a ‘dark spin’ on a trip to Moscow by Clinton when he was a student studying at Oxford.

The Daily Mail’s attacks put Labour on notice that it should expect a similar treatment to be meted out to Miliband. How the party responds will be crucial. One option, of simply trying to rise above it, should be immediately discounted. Lies, half-truths and distortions can cost elections, as Rove’s victims can attest. However, expressing righteous anger at the distortions can undermine your core strength, so serving your opponent’s narrative. Straight-talking McCain was reduced to running attack ads and so lost his huge advantage of ‘not being a typical politician’.

But if the intent behind the attack is to destroy Miliband’s reputation for being in touch, Labour’s response must demonstrate how untrue that is. That means having outriders who are prepared to respond immediately to such attacks with a passionate, accurate defence of the leader, but, as importantly, it means understanding that, in the end, the party wins by proving how in touch it is, and how out of touch its opponents are.

The 1992 Clinton campaign did not stay on the defensive when they were attacked, as Labour had done, nor did it try to ignore the attacks, as Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis had attempted to four years earlier. Instead, it recognised the essential truth about smear campaigns. They are a sign of weakness. So Clinton’s team fought back, on Bush’s record, on what his re-election would mean for families, and on how different its candidate was from ’politics as usual’. Later, the Obama campaign used the same principles, but added a new element – the power of new and social media channels to communicate rebuttals and attacks even more rapidly and with even greater precision than had ever been possible before.

As the next general election approaches, Labour must combine an aggressive rebuttal of the lies and abuse levelled against Miliband, preferably spearheaded by those outside and beyond politics. But it should also be aggressive in arguing that these attacks represent a deliberate diversion from the record, failures, and threat of what the next Tory government would mean for voters. The hiring of Matthew McGregor from the Obama campaign is a hopeful sign that the Labour leadership understands this.

Ultimately, the politics of the personal smear is an admission by a political campaign that it has  little positive to say about itself. And this is equally true of Labour advocates of such techniques, who usually combine macho self-regard with self-defeating maliciousness. But that does not mean such tactics should ever be underestimated. ‘Forget the plaudits, concentrate on the smears,’ Gould warned the Clinton campaign in one of his memos. ‘Fear builds slowly and only shows in the vote.’

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Hopi Sen is a contributing editor to Progress

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Photo: Department for Energy and Climate Change