Branding a leader

Margaret Thatcher would be pleased. Although s h e ’s been dead for 13 years, she is getting as much play from Theresa May’s ascent to power as May herself. Before May had even been proclaimed Britain’s new prime minister, the media had begun drawing comparisons between the two women. Both hailed from relatively humble backgrounds, pundits noted, and studied at Oxford — as if a half-dozen other British prime ministers didn’t share these characteristics.

And af ter May ’s first speech in Parliament, for which she wore pearls (a Thatcher trademark) and spoke bitingly of her political opponent (another Thatcherism), the media abandoned all s u b t l e ty. “Theresa May wins press plaudits as a reborn Margaret Thatcher,” The Guardian blared. “Remind You of Anybody?” The Daily Telegraph asked. “Theresa May evokes Margaret Thatcher with jibe at Jeremy Corbyn,” said The Independent.

It is unclear whether May is deliberately evoking the former prime minister. In an interview with the Evening Standard, she insisted she isn’t. “I think there can only ever be one Margaret Thatcher,” she said. “I’m not someone who naturally looks to role models. I’ve always, whatever job it is I’m doing at the time, given it my best shot.”

Of course, it would be as leader and party that hearken back to a bygone era.

It began with Justin Trudeau becoming leader. While few could now dispute his considerable capabilities as a politician, it is also difficult to imagine him having become prime minister at the age he did, and with his flimsy experience, were it not for the powerful associations we attach to his name. From the note he wrote, telling a fan to “just watch him” beat Stephen Harper, to the images of him paddling in a canoe, we can be sure such messaging is carefully crafted and strategically deployed to keep memories of his father fresh.

The narrative-building has not stopped there. Both during the election campaign and since coming to power, the Liberals have deftly marketed the idea of a party returning to past values — to a party committed to peacekeeping, to multilateralism, to social justice — while all the while coming across as anything but conservative.

If there’s an ugly underbelly to all this, it ’s that such branding exercises can displace smart discourse about politicians’ and parties’ actual achievements, platforms and mess-ups. The media only have so much space to devote to any one issue. When Britain’s most venerable newspapers run articles about May’s superficial similarities to Thatcher, important stories do not get told because these pointless ones do.

In the case of political dynasties, the ability to capitalize on a predecessor’s reputation is even more troubling. A 2009 study by Brown University came to the unsurprising conclusion that individuals who have family ties to former politicians enjoy advantages in getting into power that cannot be chalked up to talent, education or wealth. Political dynasties self-perpetuate not because they have skills voters especially value, the study found, but because they possess unique “assets” such as name recognition and contacts.

In democracies, we are notionally committed to the belief that all citizens have the opportunity to advance to elected office. While all sorts of factors prevent this ideal from being fully realized, we hasten its demise when we allow clever marketing to convince us of a politician’s suitability for office, at the expense of giving proper consideration to their actual strengths and weaknesses, and those of lesserknown candidates.

We cannot control how politicians and parties promote themselves. They will always maximize their brand strength in whatever ways prove most popular. The media, however, are in the sales business. They peddle news that consumers demand. We do control what we consume. As long as we lap up stories about pearls, we can be sure that’s what we’ll continue to get.