In one iconic photograph of Margaret Thatcher she appeared as a goddess of war mounted on a battle tank. In the emblematic representation of David Cameron transmitted last week from the Arctic circle he manifests himself as a green Adonis (dressed in blue) on his dog-drawn sledge. The contrast between the two tells us much about how the new Conservative leader is changing his party’s image.
Labour is fixated on a different mode of transport: the bike that Dave the Chameleon rides in its election broadcast. Until Cameron went wheel-less on the Norwegian ice, the pictures of him arriving at parliament on his bicycle had been the most successful piece of political propaganda for years. One snapshot of his two-wheeler on our front pages suggested that he is young, unpompous, unaffected by success, keen to keep fit, concerned about the planet and a Tory leader like no other. Six messages from one photo is good going.
So the last thing that Labour should do is remind the public that Dave rides a bike. In its confusion the party has squandered its valuable airtime.
In 1996 the Tory party chairman asked me to help him launch a new poster. I agreed without knowing that it was to be a doctored photograph of Tony Blair with devil eyes. I found it humiliating to have to defend that manifest breach of good taste. The poster resulted from the Conservatives’ total confusion about how to deal with Blair. Were we saying that he had changed, but his party had not? Or that he had not really changed? Or maybe that he had changed but might change back?
Labour’s chameleon campaign reflects an almost identical bewilderment within its ranks about how to meet the Cameron challenge. The punchline of the broadcast is that Dave is still blue underneath, which seems a less than devastating accusation against a man whose campaign rosette is indeed that colour. Cameron got to the chameleon joke first and turned it to his advantage with his local election slogan: “Vote blue, get green.”
The devil eyes poster won Campaign magazine’s prize for advertising campaign of the year — it attracted an estimated £5m of free publicity for an expenditure of only £125,000. That the publicity for the Tories was horrendous did not apparently enter the calculation. Advertising executives are on a different planet from politicians, as politicians would do well to remember. The Tories were annihilated at the following election, so giving a prize to their poster was like saying that the operation was a success but the patient died.
The Labour lads who sanctioned the chameleon broadcast will be slapping themselves on the back now over all the free publicity that they are getting. But the brouhaha keeps Cameron in the spotlight. It is degrading for a prime minister to be forced off his pedestal to defend such personal abuse. Blair looked sheepish when asked about the anti-Dave campaign. In 1997 he had promised to avoid negative campaigning.
Gordon Brown saw an opportunity last week to upstage Cameron. The chancellor went to New York to address the United Nations on climate change and to call for a new international fund to help developing countries to grow greenly. The chancellor’s spin was that while Cameron had spoken of minutiae such as better parks and more recycling, he was the man in government bestriding the globe and making big things happen.
But if his pitch was that Cameron could only think small, Brown got off to a bad start telling a television interviewer that people should be turning off their televisions at night. The remark was reminiscent of the advice given by Patrick Jenkin, the energy secretary during the power cuts of 1974, that people should clean their teeth in the dark.
Brown’s political strategy against Cameron is not sound. Voters have lost faith in international agreements. What is there to show for the Kyoto protocol drafted in 1997, and what, for that matter, have been the tangible results of last summer’s much-hyped Gleneagles summit on world poverty and global warming? Brown in New York wearing a colourful tie, even with a smile, does not compare with Dave and his huskies. Nor do electors think that the chancellor would be talking about climate change if Cameron had not ventured onto the ice first, so to speak.
While Brown believes that every problem can be tackled with a new fund, the Tory leader does not put all his faith in governments. He uses the advantage of being out of power to make Brown look cumbersome. The wind turbine on Dave’s roof and the large energy-saving investment that he is making in his house signal his wish to start a mass movement on greenery. All policy to counter climate change aims to alter public behaviour. But the big switches — such as our reduced tolerance for drunken driving and tobacco smoking — though stimulated by government develop a popular momentum. Cameron’s appealing message is that since about a third of carbon dioxide emissions come from our homes people do not have to wait on lethargic governments to initiate effective action.
Cameron is also beginning to answer some of the tougher policy questions. In his speech in Oslo on Friday he declared that government should use tax to cut the production of greenhouse gases. He has rescued the Tories from their ill-considered opposition to Brown’s climate change levy on business users. The Conservative leader plans to replace what is in effect a charge on energy use with a targeted tax on carbon. The move would favour, among other technologies, nuclear power.
That is interesting because some have speculated that Cameron will eventually come out against atomic energy. It would be the ultimate counterintuitive policy position for a Tory to adopt. I doubt that he will do that, but much depends on Cameron’s most-trusted green adviser. Zac Goldsmith is the party’s other man of charisma, and so far he has been implacably anti-nuclear.
The trip to Norway helped Cameron to elbow other stories from the headlines, even though on the face of it they were bad news for Labour not the Tories. Last week the prime minister had a literally sweaty time defending the government’s record on health. Trust hospitals are in deficit and firing staff, while GPs have duped the Department of Health into paying them more than the National Health Service can afford.
Margaret Hodge, a minister, took the unusual step of talking up the chances of another party when she revealed that in her constituency 8 out of 10 were tempted to vote for the British National party.
There was danger for the Tories in both stories. How tempting it might be to say, as commentators on the right do, that the plight of the NHS has convinced people that the taxpayer-funded model of health does not work. Well, it may be that other models would work better, but it certainly is not true that voters have reached that conclusion. They are still besotted with nationalised healthcare.
George Osborne, Cameron’s trusty shadow chancellor, dealt with the matter deftly by saying merely that even though the government should go on funding healthcare for everyone that did not mean all health professionals had to be employed directly by the government. Blair could easily say the same, and that makes it the right thing for the Conservatives to say.
With the Tories still struggling in the opinion polls, hotheads might have advised Cameron to buy off some of those potential BNP voters with a little spiced-up language on immigration policy. That would be disastrous. It would destroy all Cameron’s hard work in moving the Tories to the centre.
Self-denial is not meant to be easy or fun. But for their own good the Conservatives must not go back to the old subjects — health, immigration, tax and Europe — and talk about them in the ideological old ways.
The Tories must learn patience. It took Labour years to convince voters that it had changed. Blair knew that he was winning when his opponents demonstrated with the devil eyes poster that they did not know how to attack him. Cameron should therefore be heartened by Dave the Chameleon.
Cameron’s green policy is becoming weightier. Of course the photoshoot on the sledge is a gimmick, but it is style with substance. Can you recall a single iconic image of Gordon Brown? I can’t.
