UK politics: Spinning with the times?


PM Tony Blair has borrowed heavily from former U.S. president Bill Clinton's political playbook

By CNN's Douglas Herbert

LONDON, England (CNN) -- Are spin doctors hijacking British politics? A satire in London suggests the answer is obvious.

The play takes place against the backdrop of New Labour's annual party conference, with the prime minister holed up in a hotel suite with a phalanx of advisers, fine-tuning his big speech.

But the speech threatens to be overshadowed by a scandal-mongering journalist's dispatch. To salvage his leadership, the PM's shock troops must mobilise before the rogue reporter strikes.

Alistair Beaton's "Feelgood" may be a "comic triumph," in the words of one rave review.

But beyond the levity lie more serious questions about the changing face of British politics.

Is the country's New Labour establishment -- embodied by the telegenic prime minister, Tony Blair, and his barrister wife, Cherie -- more about "style" than "substance?"

FROM TIME

Viewpoint: OK, He's presidential. Now what?

Is Downing Street's main resident in thrall to unelected advisers, personified in "Feelgood" by a Svengali-like press handler?

Sceptics reply, emphatically, "Yes."

They speak disparagingly of "President" Tony Blair -- an allusion to the UK prime minister's perceived soft spot for a U.S. style of governance that relies heavily on polls. This is, after all, a politician who got a perm in a bid to woo women voters and tapped the mastermind behind former U.S. President Bill Clinton's first victory -- James Carville -- to serve as his own political consultant.

This is also a prime minister whose departing press chief has been criticised for grabbing almost as many headlines as his boss.

"What we're entering is a totally new era," said Trevor Kavanagh, political editor of the British tabloid The Sun, which claimed credit for the Tories' victory in 1992 after savaging Labour in an editorial before the vote.

No stone unturned

These days, he says, politicians like Blair are pulling out all the stops to speak with voters on their own terms. Downing Street, he said, tightly choreographs Blair's itinerary, with media access increasingly rare -- sometimes limited to brief appearances on a press plane to or from an event.

"Under the government, no stone is left unturned, electronic or otherwise," Kavanagh said. "It's something that was developing, but probably was turbo-charged by the (U.S.) Democratic election campaign under Clinton, which really tapped every source, every medium to its maximum potential."

Others see Blair's embrace of spin politics -- if you can call it such -- perhaps little more than an earnest attempt to communicate directly with the electorate.

"Spin doctors have been around for decades, they've just gotten more powerful," said Peter Riddell, a political columnist with The Times of London who formerly worked as a Washington-based correspondent.

Riddell rejects the notion that Blair is being manipulated by political cronies. But he acknowledges that the resources devoted to shaping political messages have increased dramatically in recent years, with more attention paid to questions of tactics, slogans and focus groups.

A possible consequence of this trend, Riddell believes, is the temptation for politicians to lead less and become more risk-averse -- a trap Blair has seemed conscious of avoiding.

While "cautious on things that people really care about like the euro," Blair has proven more ambitious in leading on issues such as Kosovo and Northern Ireland, Riddell said. Blair has also pressed for what Riddell calls "the most radical programme of constitutional reforms" that Britain has seen in recent memory.


Conservative leader William Hague has boasted of once drinking 14 pints of beer a day

Nor is spin and image-polishing a phenomenon confined to New Labour and its acolytes.

Critics scoff at boasts by opposition leader William Hague that he used to drink 14 pints of beer a day -- a claim they dismiss as a populist pitch aimed at boosting slumping ratings.

In a similar vein, they recall the time Hague showed up at London's trendy Notting Hill Carnival with his wife, Ffion, sporting a baseball cap and sipping a tropical drink from a pineapple.

Some who have met Blair argue that while he has clearly taken a cue from Clinton, he has forged his own distinct style.

"Whenever I see Blair in the House of Commons, what strikes me is he has the same patient, direct manner of communicating that Clinton has," said Elaine Kamarck, a lecturer on public policy at the John Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and former Clinton administration official.

Kamarck said she first met Blair in January 1993 during his visit to the British Embassy in Washington. Blair, then a member of Parliament, travelled to Washington shortly after Clinton's first victory.

"He wanted to know what we did to change the image of the Democratic Party," Kamarck recalled. "Here was this young, boyish MP. We had tea, spent an hour or so, he was taking copious notes."

After Labour lost the 1992 election to John Major, Kamarck said she and her team "began to talk to (Labour) about the need for a dramatic and clear signal that Old Labour is no longer." She added: "I said you should do everything we did up until the day we got elected."

Kamarck rejects the notion that there is anything especially "American" about crafting a careful political message. "I don't think that's American. I think that's modern."

"In the early '90s, Communism had fallen, socialism was really falling fast, and left-of-centre parties were asking, 'Who are we now?'… So it was not surprising that smart people in other left-of-centre parties at that time started studying the (U.S.) Democrats."

Ivor Gaber, an emeritus professor of broadcast journalism at Goldsmiths College at the University of London, said politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have acknowledged the importance of presentation and image since the beginning of 20th century.

He said New Labour under Blair has merely "developed this into a much finer art than its predecessor."