My vote’s for a party that won’t drive me mad with patronising political slogans

Those who say ‘you campaign in poetry but govern in prose’ can’t be describing modern British politics. We still have more than six weeks of campaigning to go before polling day, and already the monotony of the language used by the competing parties is causing many of us to reach for the off-button on our radios and televisions.

More than one friend has said something along the lines of ‘If I hear George osborne say “long-term economic plan” one more time, I won’t be held responsible for my actions.’ Bad luck: George — and all his Conservative cabinet colleagues — are going to be intoning that mantra into every available microphone between now and May 7.

The PR company houston — which numbers Asda, John Lewis and Bosch among its clients — has performed a service by commissioning a poll to discover which of the politicians’ pet phrases most irritate voters. It reveals that ‘long-term economic plan’ is only the fourth most annoying to a crosssection (very cross, actually) of the public: 119 out of the 2,000 people polled chose it. The overwhelming winner as most maddening phrase was: ‘hard-working families.’

Dreadful

I would have cast my vote for that as worst offender, if asked. It is especially annoying because variations of it are used by every party, so there is no escape, no matter which politician is being interviewed and regardless of the topic under debate (‘I’m glad you’ve asked me about the EU Common Fisheries Policy, Jeremy. What we’ve said is that we must have the sort of fish that ordinary hard-working families want to eat . . .’).

I wonder if it ever occurs to these MPs and would-be MPs that many of us don’t consider ourselves to be ‘ordinary hard-working people’. ordinary? Well, thank you very much. And I can’t be alone in feeling disenfranchised by a rubric which seems to exclude from all consideration those who don’t describe ourselves as hard-working.

on the whole, the British are not notably hard-working — the dreadful national figures for productivity may be evidence of that — and millions of us gain the meaning in our lives either from the time spent at home with our family, or in pursuing our hobbies. Do our votes not count?

And what about those of us whose working day is built around a good lunch? Is our unremitting contribution to the profits of the restaurant and catering trades not worthy of recognition? or our immense payments into the exchequer, given that 60 per cent of the cost of a bottle of wine is made up of tax?

You might have thought that Ukip’s leader Nigel Farage would have made a pitch for this neglected section of the electorate, given his history of (to quote his new autobiography) ‘12-hour lunches’: but with a sinking heart I heard him on the BBC Andrew Marr show yesterday morning sucking up to exactly the same group, which he called — yes, you’ve guessed it — ‘ordinary hardworking people’. And I thought he was supposed to be different from other politicians.

Perhaps the only leading mainstream politician who does use language in a way which suggests an individual human brain at work — rather than an automaton directed by remote control from party HQ — is Boris Johnson. This might explain why he is so much more popular than any of his colleagues — and why this Tory was twice able to become elected Mayor of a generally Labour-supporting city, London.

This doesn’t mean that Boris would necessarily be popular as Prime Minister — his elaborate jokes might fall flat once he had to carry out the necessarily unpopular decisions which confront all occupants of 10 Downing street. But at least he might stimulate greater interest in politics, which is in a state of almost unprecedented public obloquy.

It is, in fact, the lack of interest in politics which lies behind the endless repetition of stock phrases by party leaders, under strict instructions from their campaign managers. As one of the more articulate members of the current Tory election team explained it to me, he and his colleagues were invited by Jim Messina — the former adviser to Barack obama now employed by the Conservatives — to guess the amount of time the typical adult spends thinking about politics. The answer was four minutes. Not four minutes an hour. Not four minutes a day. Four minutes a week.

Messina’s follow-up point was that if the public’s attention to what politicians say is so fleeting, it is only by saying the same thing over and over again that the party spokesmen can hope to get any message at all across to the electorate. Messina, of course, was one of the men responsible for obama’s successful campaign slogan of 2008: Yes We Can. Many of us were driven almost demented by this meaningless mantra — Yes, we can what? — but it seemed to work.

And the most successful campaign team in recent British political history, those who invented New Labour, were notable in the way they turned a previously ill-disciplined party into a sort of leadership cult built around a handful of verbless phrases.

Bleak

At one stage during the 1997 general election, a Labour campaigner complained to the party’s manipulator-in- chief Peter Mandelson: ‘If I hear Tony or Gordon say “No More Boom and Bust” one more time, I think I might be sick.’

To which Mandelson allegedly replied: ‘And when you have actually vomited up the entire contents of your stomach out of sheer boredom, the average voter might just be starting to get our message.’

Thus we are presented with a closed loop in which the thing we find most depressing about modern politics — its complete homogeneity and predictability — is also the route to success at the ballot box. Instinctively, I rebel against that bleak prospect. But there is one encouraging thought. As with commercial advertising, the marketing slogan is not on its own sufficient to sell the product. If enough members of the public are able to see that the message is not true, then it damages rather than assists the political salesmen.

In other words, a party might win an election with a simple slogan, but it needs to be believable. And if the party later betrays the big message, it will pay the heaviest price.

No More Boom and Bust? That winning New Labour slogan now haunts the party. Let’s hope George osborne’s ‘longterm economic plan’ doesn’t do the same to the Tories.