VERY EARLY ON in Tony Blair’s rise to fame he used to be called Bambi. Parodists captured what was seen as Mr Blair’s sweet but essentially vacuous personality by comparing him with Walt Disney’s loveable but toothless baby deer. Then Blair got tough. Most notable among the evidence for this was his early and successful battle to remove Labour’s Clause Four commitment to socialism. The cartoonists needed to change their images.
It was our own Peter Brookes who drew the cartoon so many commentators still remember. On a cover of The Spectator, under the caption “Does Bambi have teeth?” appeared the gruesome image of a sweet, gambolling Bambi with sharp fangs, dripping blood. Though Mr Blair has been assailed since on every side, few have since attacked him as soft. In the marketing terms in which it is now hugely fashionable to interpret modern politics, Mr Blair has been sold as the man with the “irreducible core”; the leader who is not afraid of a row — almost recklessly so. Brand Blair has teeth. It says “strong”. It says “decisive”. It says “knows his own mind”.
And marketing is at the heart of Project Cameron. I do not decry that. It was about time the Tories woke up to its dark and ancient arts. As long as you believe in the innate usefulness of the product you seek to sell, you should not be ashamed to reach for the bag of tricks that professional marketing may offer you. Your opponents and rivals certainly will. Queen Elizabeth I knew all about marketing, so did Benjamin Disraeli, so did Winston Churchill and so does Margaret Thatcher. Indeed some of the most successful leaders have understood marketing so instinctively that they may not even have known how they relied upon it.
So please accept that what I am about to say about Mr Cameron is neither an attack on politicians’ dependence on marketing tools, nor a general wail about so-called “spin” in modern politics. Human beings have been spinning since we emerged from the primeval soup. I want Mr Cameron to spin along with the best of them, and I want him to spin well. He has something to contribute to this century’s politics, and he cannot begin until he has sold himself to us as a potential prime minister.
The advice he has taken (and given) on Brand Cameron has overwhelmingly been good. It may be summarised as making a priority of the repositioning of the Conservative Party under his leadership. The TV images you saw from Bournemouth last week — of trees, of blue sky, of sunshine and of light — and the soundbites we may remember from that conference — about those three letters “N H S”, about gay marriage, about diversity, and about beauty and optimism — are all part of a determined drive to banish old associations between the Tories and the shadows: shadows that say “extremist”, “obsessive”, “brutal”, “intolerant”, “right wing” or, simply, “old”. In the human frame of people’s faces that conference organisers had arranged as a backdrop behind Cameron as he spoke, I saw not a single grey head, while 11 out of the 39 were black, Asian or Oriental. A sample we took of 100 Tory representatives on the conference floor (not pictured) yielded four who were not white; and most of the hair was missing, or grey.
All pretty relentless. Laid on with a trowel. You have to. And the strategy has been clear: a sprinkling of policy ideas — fine — as long as they’re cuddly ones; and plenty of inspirational talk about values, and compassion, and “reaching out”; but nothing too hard-edged, awkward or potentially painful. Not yet, anyway. Once the party has rebranded itself, once the Tories have stolen back into the hearts of the general public, once everyone agrees that, whatever else, Mr Cameron is a likeable sort of chap, then — and only then — can we start saying some things that some people don’t want to hear. First the sugar; much later the pill.
Even in purely marketing terms, there is a danger that this strategy could misfire. We are closer — closer than Team Cameron may realise — to his becoming lodged in the national imagination as an amiable puffball.
Once embedded, these associations can be remarkably difficult to dislodge. Look at Neil Kinnock and the “Welsh windbag” gibe. Look at John Major and the haplessly Pooterish image he was unable to shake off. Look at Michael Howard and the Transylvanian “something of the night” cartoons. None of these leaders deserved their caricature, but all of them found that, after the image stuck, almost everything they did could be interpreted as reinforcing it.
It would be interesting to ask a focus group to consider a range of restaurant menu options, and attach to Mr Cameron the choices that spring first to mind. I don’t mind betting that jellies, marshmallows, meringues, Angel Delight and raspberry fool win out over steak, kebab, celery and Stilton, or chilli con carne. Team Cameron would probably not dissent from this: “At least it’s edible,” they would say; “the party he inherited would score highest on tripe.” And they would have a point: his and their achievement thus far has been to move the Tory brand from negative to neutral to positive.
“Silent” can say “strong” — I’ll grant you that. “Still waters” can say “deep”. “Keeps his own counsel” can say “shrewd”. “No rush to judgment” can say “keeping his powder dry”. And the image of a locked door may for a while excite all the greater curiosity about what lies behind it.
Cameron’s people are not wrong about this. Nor are they unaware of the ultimate need to harden-up the image, and probabably see this as their next objective. But the puffball picture is close to spinning out of control, and last week’s conference at Bournemouth did too little to deflate it. As a popular cliché, “nice enough, but what does he stand for?” is in danger of taking on a life of its own, and we are not far from a situation in which whenever Mr Cameron declines to engage with a difficult question, everyone starts parroting “See? Cop-out Cameron. Dave ducks again.” “Silent” can also say “clueless”. “Still waters” can also say “stagnant”.
Team Cameron have a plan for tackling this, and it is fundamentally misconceived. They want their man to find a “Clause Four moment”, an issue on which he can bravely take on the unreconstructed part of his party, and win. This is cowardly. The Conservative Party is in no fit state to give him a fight. Clever men like Norman Tebbit are too shrewd to oblige, and headstrong characters like Edward Leigh, MP, or Simon Heffer, of The Daily Telegraph, are loners or ideologues. To pick a fight with them will look like taking a playground kick at an unpopular boy with glasses. The Right in Britain are incapable of putting any boxer into the ring whom it would look remotely brave for Cameron to punch.
If he is to be credited with real courage he knows how he has to be brave. He must be brave in the way Jack Straw was brave this week when he wrote what he did about the Muslim veil. He must say or do something that he genuinely believes to be important and right but which will hurt or annoy significant numbers of people, including natural supporters. These “moments” cannot be confected or precipitated by a team of professional advisers; and if anyone tries, it will show. They must come naturally. There is no such thing as a fight that carries few real risks, yet reveals the fighter to be brave.
Otherwise the cartoonists will carry the day. Martin Rowson, of The Guardian, is drawing Mr Cameron as a plump, purple-pantalooned popinjay, prancing around a pantomime stage trilling: “Hello flowers! Hello clouds! Hello trees!” As Bambi was found to have teeth, so must a sword be discovered beneath those pantaloons — and quite urgently.
