Cargo Cults and Client Journalism
Westminster’s media management strategies have become ritualistic and stultifying
Back when I was a policy adviser at the Department for Education we used to get a call, several times a year, from the person managing “The Grid” in No 10. They would tell us that a “schools week” was planned for next month and please could we come up with three or four new announcements to be unveiled alongside a Prime Ministerial photoshoot, or promoted on the Sunday morning shows.
If they got through to Dominic Cummings they’d be given an earful and then ignored, but eventually they’d get through to someone less iconoclastic and I’d be dragooned into thinking up policies. The (hardly original) approach we developed was to repackage things we were already doing and/or present various meaningless tweaks as a big deal. Behaviour policy was a favourite – being loved by the right-wing press. We must have announced “same day detentions for pupils” five times at least. And it was written up every time.
It was this kind of soul-crushing nonsense that drove me out of working in politics. Thinking up pointless policies wasted an astonishing amount of time and soured relations with the education sector who, rightly, found it exasperating when there were real problems to deal with. Yet it remains entirely normalised within Westminster as the standard operating model for media management.
Rishi Sunak has successfully managed to calm politics down after the chaos of last year. There are any number of problems but most are slow-burning enough to be kept off the front pages. But rather than use this dividend to try a new approach his communications team has reverted back to the same strategy of minor, or made-up, announcements designed to gain positive coverage in friendly right-wing papers. Even though the returns to this approach have diminished to vanishing point.
During March readers of the Mail, Sun, Express, and Telegraph were barraged with front pages about “tough action” being taken to stop the boats andcrackdown on antisocial behaviour. There was plenty of coverage on broadcast media too, albeit somewhat more sceptical. The net result has been, at very best, marginal. The Tory poll average rose slightly from a small dip in January but nothing more. The Politico “poll of poll” average for the parties on the 12th December was Labour 46% and Conservative 27%. On April 3rd it was Labour 46% / Conservative 28%.
Tory supporters have comforted themselves that at least Sunak’s ratings have recovered. Yet Opinium last weekend found that, after an improvement during March, his approval was back to minus 15pts, the same as mid-Feb. They also found Labour leading on immigration and crime. As Will Jennings pointed out Labour have never led on immigration before the last year.
The really depressing thing is that Conservative strategists think it worked and see it as a trial run for the full election campaign next year. Labour strategists seem to think it’s the right approach too – having unveiled their own packages of crackdowns on various benighted groups.
It’s undeniably true that the majority of the British public is, on these matters, instinctively conservative and happy to support authoritarian policy, albeit increasingly less so. But to the extent voters ever believed these front pages they don’t any longer. An Ipsos poll last week found the percentage with confidence in the press at 13% overall and 5% amongst Gen Z. Numbers were similar for political parties. Ironically those “new elite” types in the civil service are the only ones who’ve maintained similar levels of confidence over the past forty years these questions have been asked. Even more ironically, given ongoing debates about popular revolts against the elites, the only institutions who’ve seen rising trust in the last few years, apart from trade unions, are the justice system and the EU.
So how did this approach to media management get so embedded in Westminster and why has it stopped working?
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