Election 2001 - The magic has gone: a gyrating Geri Halliwell and adoring schoolgirls did nothing for Labour's image. Now, substance is back, reports Jackie Ashley
If this election does nothing else (other than increase Labour's gargantuan majority still further) it has done us one favour: perform the last rites for spin. Yes, it's finished. Spin has been buried by its very own godfather - Peter Mandelson has said goodbye to all that, arguing that people are tired of "soundbites and photo-opportunities", that it is time for new Labour to lift its sights "and not simply rely on the well-worn methods of campaigning, message delivery and rebuttal . . . " This is indeed sensational stuff. It is rather like Alastair Campbell declaring that he has found his inner self, and it's soft and fluffy; or like Philip Gould saying he finds focus groups a pretty useless way of making policy. The magician has broken his wand.
Not likely, you may say: it is just that the latest spin is anti-spin. It's all spin, in the end. But the truth, surely, is that the first stages of this general election campaign have confirmed something that has been becoming clearer by the day for months now, if not years: the magic no longer works anyway. Instead of a campaign of synthetic soundbites, cynical photo-opportunities and spotty youths from Millbank bullying journalists, we have been watching a serious engagement about real issues, conducted mostly by grown-up (if universally male) politicians in the old style - days and days of argument about tax and spending plans, crime, employment, even the environment. Labour's manifesto is particularly wodgy - pages and pages of unspun, unglamorous detail on how to reform the public services, with precious few gimmicks.
True, we have seen a particularly laughable opening attempt at spin, Tony Blair's ghastly photo opportunity at St Saviour's and St Olave's school in south London. But it was so far beyond parody, that it is now impossible to find anyone at Labour headquarters who will admit responsibility for it or say a word in its favour. With its backdrop of stained-glass windows and crucifix, the school event wasn't proof that spin lives on: it was actually its funeral service.
Other "tried and trusted" techniques have fallen equally flat, not least the famous grid, the spin-doctors' most treasured piece of equipment, which wrote Labour's manifesto launch into the scheme of things a week too late. Labour was only saved more days of embarrassing "er, we can't answer any questions about our tax policy yet" by the Tories blowing up their own campaign with confused messages about the size of their tax cuts.
And then there was the attempt to ginger up the party's election broadcast by featuring Geri Halliwell. Sorry, guys, it was great publicity for Geri Halliwell, but none of that has rubbed off on to new Labour. Nor has it stirred the apathetic youth to taking more of an interest in politics. It's all Halliwell's vitamin injections and breast-support structures, not her views on Labour's policies, that have caught the eye.
Mandelson may well have a vested interest in trying to portray the campaign as a flop without his immeasurable contribution, but let's be fair. On this point he is right. Spin has spun itself out. Long before the election, Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell and their lieutenants were expressing their frustration and despair at the obsession of the media with "process". In his first unhappy grilling of the election campaign, with a supercharged John Humphrys on Radio 4's Today programme, Blair protested again that the media were obsessed with "process and personalities" instead of policies. This is code for the way in which journalists have become ever more fascinated with the ham-fisted and often ludicrous attempts to manipulate them, to the extent that they are ceasing to write about the actual policies or issues behind the spin at all.
But new Labour was responsible for all this. It was as if it had devised a hypnotic, leaping Billy Elliot-style dance routine, and then chided us for not paying more attention to the orchestra. Or, to use another analogy, as if there was a reverse Midas touch. Spin was meant to turn everything in politics to gold. Instead, it turned everything to dross.
I am not saying that there will be no more bullying of journalists. Nor that cheesy photo-opportunities will stop. Nor will press officers stop swaggering, or politicians not struggle to find simple, alliterative phrases to sum up bigger thoughts. All those things have gone on for years, wherever we have modern electoral politics. No, what has stopped is the worship of manipulative behaviour as one of the key strands of progressive politics. It doesn't work any more. It has spread cynicism far beyond where it would otherwise have been found.
"Spin" did not start with Mandelson or with new Labour, but with Margaret Thatcher and Tim Bell, and the shiny, smug team of PR men and advertisers the Tories brought into government in the early Eighties to dispose of ramshackle, well-meaning, Foot-era Labour. Labour has merely learned from them. Mandelson, like Blair and Brown, watched, groaned - and took note. The "red rose" era was no more than a snaffling of the Tory glitz and ruthlessness.
In opposition, Labour was, at first, fairly bad at spin. There were meetings of the National Executive Committee from which rumpled lefties emerged to tell the cameras about the latest treachery, while Neil Kinnock and his allies watched in horror from an upstairs window. There were still endless splits, public rows and ill-concealed snipings. But slowly, first under Kinnock, then under Blair, control was exercised; the centre clamped down on things and the message was sharpened.
Spin had a false dawn in 1992 when Labour so nearly won the election, and then a real dawn five years later. By then, the centre-left had become adept at control - handing out exclusive stories and quality time with Blair like sweeties to newspapers; terrifying junior journalists with late-night phone calls of unbelievable rudeness; winning three days' publicity for the price of one by first leaking a story exclusively, then selectively, then giving out the story to parliament; forcing every member of the shadow cabinet to say the same dull but consistent thing, week after week, until even apolitical punters knew the words. And it worked. Just after Labour's first election victory, Peter Mandelson, according to his biographer Donald Macintyre, still held the view, shared with Alastair Campbell (and Tony Blair), that "policy and presentation" were inseparable. Yet, it wasn't long before presentation became the cloak that obscured the policies.
The Labour team were thrilled with their "manipulation" of the first Queen's speech, which made even Her Majesty sound on-message. Yet, a couple of months later, the sight of Charlie Whelan and his gang, whooping with delight at the way journalists swallowed their bait in the television documentary about No 11, We Are the Treasury, horrified the press, and left the spinners looking smug, not clever.
Cool Britannia and the Dome - two carefully crafted images - fell flat, too, and led to much mocking. It was all one pistachio poster too far. Clare Short hit out at "people who live in the dark". Alastair Campbell repeated Charlie Whelan's mistake a few years later by inviting Michael Cockerell to film him at work - and the attempt to prove that he was just a straight guy, not a media manipulator, rebounded horribly, too. Campbell became a huge figure in his own right, inspiring the likes of Rory Bremner to satirise him - and his relationship with Blair - most brutally. And Mandelson fell twice, gleefully hounded by the journalists whom he snubbed and manipulated at the height of his powers.
Throughout much of the last parliament, we feared that "spin" had become a condition of political life, the end result of modernisation, a new political world that was with us for ever. We were wrong, thank God. Spin, it turns out, was a phase, part of growing up, and of new Labour's painful adolescence - just a nasty, juvenile overreaction to the Tories' old dominance of advertising and the black arts. Now it has quite simply become a laughing stock. Spin has hurt the government because it has fed cynicism. Rather than win over all the newspapers to Labour, it has made almost every journalist a bit of a jeerer. But the good news, which should make everyone who cares about politics give two cheers for democracy, is that it was never for ever.
It may only have lasted four and a half minutes, but in West Yorkshire this week, for the first time in years, Tony Blair was allowed to run into a few "ordinary folk" who hadn't been hand-picked by his advisers. We are promised more of this as the campaign progresses. Let him out of his box: he is at his best when he's not stage-managed. Long before this campaign reaches its peak, we can safely pronounce that spin's rule is over, its once-feared power dead. May it spin in its grave.
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