The deepest cruelty of politics is its simplicity: pose with a banana and you are bang in trouble. The obverse truth is that a straightforward and positive image can work wonders: David Cameron’s tree- and huskie-hugging photo-ops in the initial months of his leadership were widely mocked, but they worked wonders in cementing the notion that Dave was both new and green. We do indeed live in the first-impressions world brilliantly described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink.
It follows from this that complexity kills. When a Government begins to disaggregate, the problem is not only the intrinsic one of division (this lot are more concerned with fighting each other than helping me) but the related danger of competing voices (which of these idiots should I listen to? Probably none of them). Part of the New Labour project was to put behind the party once and for all the days when, in answer to the question “What is your defence policy?”, its spokesman would answer: “Which one would you like?”. This Government is still reasonably good at staying on-message where policy is concerned. But it still does not speak with one voice. Rather, a series of narratives, some extraordinarily petty, jostle and vie for our attention.
The Big Story of Labour’s conference week in Manchester ought to have been, and was for a short while: Gordon deploys wife to save himself, and delivers not-half-bad speech to keep rebels at bay. But the Keystone Cops chaos of Ruth Kelly’s departure confused that simple message and pushed the speech out of the headlines. Even as Labour closed the opinion poll gap a little, the focus was on the preposterous manner of the Transport Secretary’s exit and the Cabinet reshuffle it will trigger. The row over whether Mr Miliband compared himself to Heseltine, whether the BBC was right to report the allegations and whether the PM meant to insinuate that his Foreign Secretary was a novice rumbles on too. The picture is muddled, fractured, disaggregating. Why should the voter pay any attention at all?
The Tories cannot believe their luck. Neither can I.
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