Brown says: let’s make agricultural subsidies history. Where can we get the wristband?
This article appeared in Labour conference week after the speeches of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Mr Blair had fought his last election as leader. There was much speculation about when the latter would replace the former, which he did two years later.
In the mid-1990s the American mobile phone business realised that it had a problem. It could get men to buy phones, but women just wouldn’t. Women thought mobiles were just boys’ toys.
Then AT&T began screening a commercial that sent sales through the roof. A mother gets ready to leave for work. The house is in chaos, the babysitter has plonked the kids in front of the television. The children start pestering their mother to take them to the beach. ‘I’ve got a meeting with a client,’ says the mother. Her youngest child replies with the line that made the ad famous. ‘When can I be a client?’
The commercial finishes with the mother sitting on the beach, the children running around her, playing happily. She is using her mobile to talk to the client. And throughout the entire commercial, the word ‘phone’ is never mentioned.
Ten years ago this advert was being used to sell phones. These days it is being used to sell a message about political communications. Dave Winston, former adviser to Newt Gingrich and now pollster for the Republican House and Senate campaigns, shows it to his candidates when explaining how he wants them to talk to voters.
He explains to them that they need to touch voters and not just talk at them. They need to make them feel an emotional affinity, a real need, for what the candidate has to offer. They need to appeal as AT&T did.
The traditional method of selling a phone was to talk about battery life, access charges, the reach of the network. It was all about mechanics, never touching on reasons, never touching on people’s (and particularly women’s) daily lives. The traditional pitch for a mobile phone was like … well, it was like a Gordon Brown speech.
On Monday the Chancellor battered his audience with a long list of statistics about finance facilities and percentages of GDP. At one point he offered us the catchy slogan: ‘Let us make agricultural export subsidies history.’ Where do we go to get the wristband?
Mr Brown’s conference address and his Sunday Times interview have been interpreted as closing the gap between the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. They did nothing of the kind. They simply demonstrated the size of the gulf that separates them.
This gulf is not essentially one of policy (although, of course, there are substantial differences). And it cannot be bridged by adopting the Blairite agenda, even if that is Mr Brown’s intention. However hard he looks, the Chancellor will not find the secret of Mr Blair’s appeal hidden in the conclusions of an NHS White Paper. And he will not become a Blairite by promising to implement a pilot scheme for an internal market in the provision of school textbooks.
The key to the Prime Minister’s success is to be found elsewhere – in his personality, in the way he mounts an argument and in his ability to communicate with Middle England. These the Chancellor simply cannot match.
Take Mr Brown’s decision, announced at the weekend, to commission a report on the Middle East so that he could drive the peace process. And whom did he appoint to write the document? That great expert on the Arab question, Ed Balls. Isn’t there anyone else he trusts other than Balls of Arabia? If Tony Blair had done the commissioning, he would have picked someone from far outside his personal circle – the Tory businessman Archie Norman, say. Brown lacks the trust and the confidence.
Then there is his ability to communicate. When designing the Republican House and Senate campaigns for particular pieces of legislation, Dave Winston uses something called ‘communications laddering’. A politician might start with the technical attributes of a policy (say cutting tax by 5 per cent) and then move to its technical benefits (you will have more money in your pocket). Winston wants them to go up the ladder identifying personal benefits that might appeal to the emotions (so, for instance, you might be able to buy music lessons for your children). Support the tax cut and be a better parent.
The classic example of the successful use of communications laddering is provided by the Republican campaign to win support for an increase in the defence budget. Winston was after the support of the group he termed ‘security moms’. Traditionally women have not backed higher military spending, so instead of talking about percentages of spend and the size of the armed forces, the Republicans concentrated on making families safer from attack.
Try applying Winston’s model to a typical Brown speech. The Chancellor spends most of the time right at the bottom of the ladder, talking about the technical attributes of his policy (‘£55 billion of debts written off for ever, the delivery of debt cancellation of 100 per cent’). Occasionally he travels up one rung and sets out a possible benefit of his programme (greater share ownership, to use an example from Monday’s speech) but he very rarely moves successfully from these rational components of a political message to the emotional ones. If ever he does, it is to touch the emotions of Labour activists rather than those of Middle England.
Mr Blair, by contrast, finds ascending the communications ladder simple. He brings his arguments back time after time to real people and their concerns – to the patient anxious for the results of a diagnostic test, the young family struggling to afford their first home, the disabled person needing help to get back into the workforce.
He makes real arguments too. For all that he has a formidable intellect, Mr Brown’s speech was simply relentless. That of Mr Blair was compelling.
The Brownites believe they can adopt the best bits of Mr Blair’s agenda and move on smoothly. They will find it isn’t as easy as that, nowhere near as easy. Mr Brown and his circle have never properly appreciated the political brilliance of Tony Blair. When he is gone they will. And they will miss it. Oh, how they will miss it.