Odd, on the face of it, that the government’s recent choice of agencies to deliver £1.68billion-worth of what Campaign called “marketing and communications” across the public sector, received so little attention in the mainstream press. True, this spend will be over the next four years. But it would be enough for, say, two or three new district hospitals.
No doubt much of this is for worthy and necessary purposes – from advertising campaigns seeking blood donors or recruiting teachers and armed service personnel. It’s hard, nevertheless, not to regard it as a symbol of the government’s touching belief that better communications will solve their problems.
There is nothing new in this. The resources and attention focused on communications and media handling by successive governments has hugely increased, a lot of it since Tony Blair took office in 1997. Part of Labour’s strength had been its capacity, as Blair put it, to “fight hand to hand for the day’s headlines”, and much of that survived the transition from opposition, where it’s virtually the only battle a party can fight, to government, where it isn’t.
But the preoccupation with communications persisted through the Cameron era and has arguably grown steadily ever since. Nor has Starmer been a slouch in all this: appointing the ex-Sun editor David Dinsmore to the civil service job of “Permanent Secretary Director for Government Communications” beside the army of officials and political appointees responsible for government communications was, to say the least, innovative. (It appears to be Dinsmore who assigned the lion’s share of the new £1.68billion spend to the global, but previously somewhat struggling, WPP Media).
Of course, the exponential advances in technology and social media, not to mention the continuous 24/7 output of even “legacy” media, have created challenges that would have been unrecognisable 30 years ago. That said, the political obsession with communications can make the business of policy-making and execution, on which governments ultimately stand or fall, more difficult.
Take The Grid. The concept was developed for the Blair government by Alastair Campbell as a means of centrally co-ordinating – and preventing clashes between – government policy announcements. But as Sam Freedman, sometime adviser at the Department of Education, argues in his brilliant book Failed State, it gradually became a tyrant, forcing departments, to “feed the beast” with half-baked announcements or ones that weren’t actually new. Freedman cites the “English baccalaureat” – so titled “because it sounded European and The Guardian would like it” and announced with minimum preparation to give Michael Gove something to unveil on Andrew Marr’s then-Sunday BBC show. Freedman says the core principle was probably right but “the need for a rapid, and exclusive, announcement meant we ended up with a worse policy than necessary”.
And if announcement-it is militates against good government, it isn’t that great for journalism either. The pattern of ministers making endless announcements is as much a trademark of the Starmer government as of its predecessors: give it exclusively to one paper, ensuring that it is followed up and, above all, gets on air. This is an (intentional) means of diverting political reporters from fulfilling the William Randolph Hearst mantra that “news is what someone, somewhere, doesn’t want reported: all the rest is advertisement”. Freedman again, this time on party conferences: “A big part of the stage management is ensuring enough announcements to keep journalists occupied and out of trouble.” (Trouble for the party, that is, not for the journalists). Peter Mandelson is discredited, but the (admittedly self-serving) remark attributed to him about Labour’s 1987 election campaign, when he was the party’s director of communications, that “the packaging was great, it was just that the product kept seeping through” is a lasting rebuke to the seductive idea that better presentation is the key to real success.
Few, of the dozen or so U-turns by the Starmer government can be blamed on the demands of The Grid, ferocious, as I am told, those demands still are. But many – from winter fuel allowances to digital ID cards – share something with Grid-generated errors: the failure to work out the real-world impact of such measures before announcing them. And these in turn follow a wider failure; like Blair’s Labour Party in 1997, Starmer’s fought a ruthlessly successful election campaign. But unlike Blair’s, it came into office with little sense of what it wanted to do. And that is something you cannot simply communicate yourself out of.
Media obsession at the expense of real governing does not make good politics. Freedman, whose book was written when the Conservatives were still in power, draws a telling contrast: Liz Truss, a politician who rose to the top by being regarded as a capable media performer (and once asked her junior minister Rory Stewart to devise an instant new plan for national parks in time “to get it in the Telegraph on Friday”) and David Gauke, who as justice minister got on quietly with the necessary job of reducing the prison population by ending custodial sentences of less than six months. Truss became (a catastrophic) prime minister, Gauke’s reforms were quickly reversed when he left the government after Boris Johnson took over.
Freedman writes: “What’s the point in thinking long-term when there is a negative impact on your career from doing so … The only way this will change is when party leaders, and their top teams, prioritize policy over communications again.” Amen to that.