The Times - UK (2022-05-28)

‘Prinny’ is no role model

for a regent Charles

Weekend essay

Pages 36-37

Carol Midgley Notebook

sell customers a £2 bag for life.

Dammit. I’ve fallen for that trick.

The employee added

that those

contracted to work

24 hours a week

would get six

four-hour shifts not

three eight-hour

ones, to avoid paying

them for breaks. How

nice from a company

so caring it was once

nicknamed the Gulag.

A few years ago MPs

were told that

an employee gave birth

in a toilet because she

was afraid of missing a

day’s work.

But perhaps we’re

looking at things the

wrong way. After all, it’s

everyone’s eco-duty to

take bags with them and thus

avoiding gifting Mike Ashley,

Sports Direct’s founder, £2. Maybe

Ashley is simply a passionate

eco-educator showing us green

tough love and we owe him our

grateful thanks. Yes, that’ll be it.

Wasps aren’t all bad

I

saved an ailing wasp with my bee

reviver, a vial of sugary liquid on a

key ring, and a friend was aghast.

“Why resurrect an evil wozzer?” she

said. Ah, well. I like them. I believe

they suffer bad PR because they’re

less “sexy” than a fat, fuzzy

bumblebee.

As a plain girl at school

surrounded by stunners, I relate. Etsy

sells a Know Your Bees mug

featuring photos of a honeybee and

bumblebee compared harshly and

vulgarly with a wasp. So I’m pleased

a new book, Endless Forms: The

Secret World of Wasps, counters such

wasp racism by highlighting their

positives. OK they’re sadistic

torturers, paralysing their prey while

keeping it alive, but they are valuable

pollinators who help balance the

eco-system and eliminate clothes

moths so they might even save your

jumper. Put down the rolled-up

newspaper and give wasps a break.

Or a swig of your beer.

Dirty old cars

F

arewell, the Ford Fiesta. Like an

ageing actress no longer

deemed “hot”, it looks likely to

be retired as production shifts to

electric. It was my first car, a black

Mark I bought third-hand for £500

when I was 22 and which stank of

cigarettes. I loved it. My next three

cars were Fiestas and I only

occasionally wondered why it was

named after a 1970s porn mag.

Accidents do happen. Hyundai

renamed its SUV Kona in Portugal

having not realised that it’s slang

there for “vagina”. But given that

Ford also had the Escort and Austin

the Mini Mayfair, the porn

connection begins to look deliberate.

I do hope the latest model will be

unveiled as the Ford Razzle.

car door for three hours. People

say it’s “exhilarating” and that I

don’t know what I’m missing,

or accuse me of being “chippy”.

Well, look. A holiday to me

means a sun lounger and

a book, not snow and

broken legs. The weather’s

bad enough in Blighty; I

refuse to pay to fly

somewhere even colder.

I’m sure it’s my loss but

I’ll live with it. As a

comedian once said,

skiing is just knocking

trees down with your

face.

Bagged again

N

ot-so-shocking news

from the Sports

Direct front line. A

former employee claims

that staff are trained to

say they’ve run out of cheapo

10p carrier bags when really

they’re under the counter, then

K

PMG is worried that less
privileged staff will feel
excluded if richer
colleagues brag about their
gap years, private
education and skiing holidays and
urges them to keep shtoom. Well,
you’re safe to give me a job, KPMG,
because I’ve never experienced any
of those things. I have never been
skiing and can guarantee that I never
will. Feel free to put this in my
contract because, as I always say,
skiing has all the allure of having
one’s ankles slammed repeatedly in a

No, I didn’t

have a gap

year and I’ve

never skied

At last, substance is triumphing over style

With voters craving grown-up government, Sunak’s attempt to tackle the cost of living crisis seems to mark a sea change

Comment

managed to attract a reputation for

being too clever by half in message-

making: big hat, rather fewer cattle.

Public scepticism grew.

Today’s Downing Street has been

elevating the mismatch to a new

height. By covering an inflated

balloon in gluey wet paper, letting it

set, then bursting and removing the

balloon, you can make a Japanese

lampshade, but at least you get a

lamp. As the air hisses from this

prime minister’s balloon there will be

found nothing but a crust of thin

paper.

That’s anyway what Australian

voters seem to have noticed in their

former PM. On the Australian right it

was hoped that Crosby-style

marketing alone could rescue Scott

Morrison, a flimsy prime minister.

“Scotty from marketing” they called

him. Last weekend Australian voters

called time on this cynical vote-

seeking. Likewise in 2017 a British

electorate was not quite persuaded by

Sir Lynton’s advice that it was enough

to keep shouting “strong and stable”

to get a landslide for Theresa May.

Might the curtain be coming down,

here too, on the elevation of

presentation over content? This week

the government actually did

something. Is it too much to hope our

politicians are getting the message?

not going to name names beyond

that of Sir Lynton Crosby, who is a

more interesting and thoughtful man

than the style of cynical and

unscrupulous vote-seeking with

which his company has become

associated, but in Britain too the

elevation of message over substance

has grown ever more pronounced in

the years I’ve been following politics.

Mrs Thatcher’s Bernard Ingham

was not innocent of this but there

were some solid beliefs behind his

image-making. Tony Blair was overly

absorbed by message-crafting and

Alastair Campbell was employed to

make us think it was all very clever

(I remember a Times political editor

needing to explain to me what New

Labour’s “on-message” and “off-

message” meant) but Blair did have a

real direction to signal. David

Cameron and George Osborne

Sir Lynton Crosby brought Australia’s

slick political comms to British politics

survive scrutiny? That the rabbit had

not in fact materialised within the

hat? One’s first and immediate

response would have been suspicion.

That is what we’ve come to in Britain:

politics as a branch of marketing. The

labelling rather than what’s in the tin.

Yet in the face of all nod-nod, wink-

wink media regard for the supposed

potency of the dark arts of political

presentation, I assert that the

ordinary man and woman in Britain

can spot “comms” a mile off and sniff

weasel words at a thousand paces.

The public are now very, very quick

to detect the hand of

communications professionals,

whereupon they immediately switch

off. We’re super-sensitive to the use

of language. We know the tell-tale

signs. We know that “great news!”

will preface something pitifully dull.

When abroad (as I am now) we read

a text message from Vodafone

beginning “just one more quick

thing”, we know at once this

faux-chatty greeting introduces an

invitation to increase our spending

limit.

In political communications we’re

alive to the particular words and

phrases that give the game away:

“mission”, “passionate about”, “let me

be clear”, “what I would say... ”,

“don’t get me wrong”, “... and will

continue to do so”, “courage and

resolution”, “put in place a raft of

measures”, “ramp up”, “roll out”.

Expressions whose stale pretence at

cutting a dash cloaks at best

something much smaller than it

pretends to be, at worst complete

vacuity.

It would be unjust to blame all this

on Australia but it’s fair to say that on

the right in British politics the

Australian right has been seen as

leading the way in the art of election-

winning political communications.

We hire these people to advise us. I’m

T

his column ends in
Australia, where politics has
been shrivelling to a
specialised branch of
marketing; from whose
“communications” gurus modern
British politicians have for decades
sought advice on winning elections;
and where in a federal election last
weekend such advice hit the wall
and a government fell: fell on merits
rather than on message.
But the column starts in the office
of our chancellor, where this week a
cabinet minister did something. At
last! A plan! Why do I read the
chancellor’s proposals for helping
households through energy price-
rises with such a sense of relief? It’s
not, after all, as if these handouts are
necessarily wise. I harbour a primitive
and untutored Tory anxiety that once
you give people money it becomes
almost impossible to take it away
again — and they’ll soon be back for
more.
And why the song in my heart
when two years ago Rishi Sunak
announced his furlough plan to pay
80 per cent of people’s wages during
lockdown, when I suspected he could
have got away with 65 per cent?
The blessed relief in both cases was
the arrival of hard, solid policy
announcements: big measures
designed to meet a big problem; the
sort of grown-up government people
crave when insecurity bites. Here was
a minister doing something rather
than saying something: constructing
a policy rather than crafting a
message. I’m far from exempting
Rishi Sunak from the charge of silly

and cynical flirtations with image

rather than substance, but I notice

the growing public and media hunger

for substance, and hope that in the

favourable reception these plans have

mostly received, he will notice too. I

do get the sense of an individual who

wants to do something rather than

just be somebody. It’s a start.

In modern Britain, political

substance is an oasis amid the

shifting sands of verbal trickery. In an

age of hokey-cokey — leaning in,

leaning out, shaking it all about,

nudging, dog-whistling, levelling up,

scraping barnacles off boats,

delivering change, being the change,

tailoring the message, “branding”,

“dead-catting”, identifying “wedge

issues,” putting “clear blue water”

between yourself and your opponents

— here was a practical response to a

calamity facing millions of people.

Sunak is no stranger to toe-curling

personality-cult PR; which of us

didn’t wince at all that stuff with

petrol pumps? But, as in the early

days of lockdown, his work this week

shows what we crave, beyond tailored

shirts and novelty coffee mugs. Next

he’ll have to try something more

difficult than giving money away.

This plan was put together by both

No 10 and No 11. But imagine it were

the prime minister and his machine

announcing these proposals. The

immediate response would be

“where’s the catch?” I grow weary of

questioning Boris Johnson’s

credibility: even his friends know it’s

shot. But, left to present the plan,

would he have convinced us it would

actually happen? That it would

The average person

can sniff weasel words

at a thousand paces

Shouting ‘strong and

stable’ was never going

to win May a landslide

Matthew

Parris

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