Abstract
Has communications support for the May government been uniquely awful – or are some stories just too bad to be made any better by PR?
Sometimes it falls to a minor character with a walk-on part in the main drama – the Fool, for example, in the plays of the Elizabethan era – to tell the audience what is really happening. And so it was that history pointed its finger at Tyron Frampton, a 24-year-old from Northampton, better known as a rapper called slowthai – and, yes, that's in lower case – who told The New York Times: “What does it matter being part of a Union when we can't resolve the issues in our country?” As is the way with rappers, this was, of course, a rhetorical question.
It is how others see us that is often the most telling, but a Daily Telegraph columnist, Michael Henderson, worked himself into a lather of irritation over this report in The New York Times about life in these troubled times in Britain. He was outraged by what he saw as a gleeful attempt to portray the British as “basket cases” and the country as “worthy of a unique level of opprobrium” because of the 2016 vote to leave the European Union. What he resented was its focus on this one man as an illustration of anything about life in Britain today.
I will return to the details of slowthai's life, because that life actually has a relevance to the political divisions exposed in the last three years. My main purpose here, however, is to look at the public relations of the government, rather than those of the country which Henderson has sprung so valiantly to defend. The two are, of course, closely connected. The wonder is that the foreign press takes the trouble to examine what is going on below the parapet in the UK and does not merely focus on the extraordinary shambles presented to the rest of the world by our government – for that is, indeed, some story.
At risk of wearying the reader with a familiar recitation, we have a political process in stasis. At the time of writing, we have a government that is marking time, but not governing. We have a parliament which has been sitting for longer than any other in over a century, but which has no legislation in passage. We have a prime minister who has lost all authority and who is going, but not gone. It is highly possible by the time you read this that the men in grey suits (a metaphor, but there do not seem to be any women in this category in the higher echelons of the Conservative Party) may have come for Theresa May and, if not, there is widespread speculation at Westminster that the people in white coats cannot be far behind. “How does she even get up in the morning?” one government communications expert speculated in open wonderment.
Meanwhile, the cabinet has lost any sense of cohesion and leaks as openly as the ceilings in the ancient Palace of Westminster, itself another gloomy metaphor for the state of British politics. The chief whip, Julian Smith, has bemoaned the “worst cabinet ill-discipline in history”. Jonathan Haslam, who ran Number 10's communications operation for John Major and is now working in corporate finance and lecturing on cruise liners about how it used to be done, said: “You might as well stick a camera in the cabinet.”
To suggest that the Conservative Party, the party supposedly in government, is in disarray would not sufficiently convey its utter confusion. It has lost the traditional glue of loyalty, as the leaking demonstrates. At the last count, an astonishing 49 members of the government had resigned or been fired since the 2017 general election and while 12 of these admittedly were only parliamentary private secretaries who are little more than bottom-rung bag carriers on the parliamentary career ladder, Mrs May had lost the extraordinary total of 11 members of the cabinet. That means that this prime minister has lost more government members already than Margaret Thatcher during her 11 years in office, or Tony Blair in his 10 years. In March this year, there were 15 vacant posts in government, apparently because of a lack of candidates to fill them. Three MPs have left to join Change UK, the new Independent Group and two others have resigned the whip or declined to continue support for the government. In the month of May 2019, four out of every five members of the Conservative Party wanted Mrs May replaced as party leader – a figure equivalent to 82 per cent of the membership – while a record number of Conservative MPs (and counting) had declared an interest in the job. All of this before the European parliamentary elections, on which £100 million is expected to have been unnecessarily expended, and when this government will truly have learned the extent of its political unpopularity. Lost members, lost seats and lost credibility. Has any government ever had worse public relations?
They have all had melt-downs. There was the remarkable expletive-rich analysis of the state of the Tony Blair government offered by Sir Richard Mottram, then the permanent secretary at Environment, at the time of the row over burying bad news. “We're all fucked. I'm fucked. You're fucked. The whole department is fucked. It's the biggest cock-up ever. We're all completely fucked,” he wailed (Sir Richard would, embarrassed, later refer to this outburst as “the remarks I'm alleged to have made with the asterisks”). It was gratifying also to be reminded of the occasion when, during a particularly bad spell for the Edward Heath government, Sir William Armstrong, who was head of the civil service, rolled on the floor of 10 Downing Street in front of the governor of the Bank of England. More lurid reports suggested, inaccurately, that he was naked. (After an appropriate period of rest, Sir William left the civil service and was appointed chairman of the Midland Bank). Even these excitements cannot compare to today's circumstances, however, nor the fact that the political crisis has continued now for three years.
Juncker gives Foreign Office a kick up the Brexit
It has been a strange period in British politics and not the least depressing aspect of that has been the international response to what has been going on. The rest of the world has watched and wondered as the on-going struggle to resolve Brexit, to find any form of political agreement on a way to move forward, has engulfed the prime minister's office, the government, all of the political parties and the entire political system. The consequent loss of British standing on the world stage, where once our politicians were admired and our diplomats regarded as models of the genre, has been a source of utter dismay in King Charles Street. They don't like it one little bit in the Foreign Office that the UK has become a laughing stock abroad, nor a perpetual butt of international mockery. Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, who has always been one with a ready joke, scarcely misses an opportunity to make matters even more embarrassing. Speaking recently about the lack of resolution of the Brexit problem, he referred to the language implications for the EU when and if the UK leaves. English, along with French and German, is one of the three “procedural” languages of the EU and it has been decided that this status will remain after Brexit – even though then the only member countries with English as the official language will be Ireland and Malta, with a joint population equivalent to 1 per cent of the Union. “Everyone understands English,” said Juncker. He paused. “Nobody understands England but everybody understands English.” Everybody except the British diplomats present – thought that a very funny apercu.
“We are not living in normal times,” one person said during my researches for this article, and most journalists working at Westminster would certainly concur enthusiastically with that analysis. It has been a remarkable period in politics and it is perhaps only the journalists who have been able to derive professional pleasure – so many stories! - from what has been happening. For everybody else, the politicians, the civil servants and, above all, those who have been charged with responsibility for conveying something of the government's purpose to the outside world, the three years since the referendum have been an unimaginable nightmare. The foul-mouthed ravings of Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It could not even start to do justice to the difficulties that they have faced. But almost everyone to whom I spoke – journalists, special advisers, politicians and professionals in the trade of communications – was agreed on one thing: it was not the fault of those professional practitioners. “It is the principals who have to take the responsibility,” said one former press secretary. “You can have the best communications strategy in the world and it's not going to make a bad story any better.”
The present government's primary problem is, therefore, that the lack of any political coherence in its Brexit strategy has had the inevitable consequence of the daily drubbing so dramatically played out in the press. The prime minister's director of communications, Robbie Gibb, has his critics – particularly among some of the party's MPs and those who suspect that the prime minister relies upon him too strongly, given his known position as a long-standing Brexiteer – yet he also earns sympathy for the difficulties he has faced since he took the job in July 2017. That summer was a tidemark in this sorry narrative. The disastrous decision to call a general election two years ago not only lost Theresa May her overall majority in the House of Commons, it also led to her losing the team she had taken with her into Downing Street, her advisers Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill in particular. Katie Perrior also left then, to be replaced by Gibb. The subsequent breakdown of political authority and party loyalty has meant that members of the government have felt they can say what they like to whomsoever they like, ministers in the same department appear to brief against each other, and government statements are countermanded within hours of being issued. The prime minister herself says one thing and does another.
Iain Anderson, the founder and chairman of Cicero, the country's largest lobbying business, compared government Brexit policy to a shopping trolley, zigging towards one extreme of policy, then zagging in another direction. It has ended up angering everybody, he said, exhausting the country's business interests and causing the Conservative Party to smash itself against the Brexit rocks. This month (June 2019) he is publishing a book setting out these frustrations. It is called, unapologetically, “F**k Business. The Business of Brexit”, (asterisks included), the title taken from a reported comment by Boris Johnson when he was questioned about the impact of the government's Brexit policy when he was foreign secretary. “It doesn't feel like there is any kind of message at all,” he said. Government policy was, he suggested, somewhat akin to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “I can't remember quite how we got here and where it started and where it's going.” Like many of its own politicians, he is unable to forecast with any certainty that the Conservative Party will even survive.
Rhetorical rapper to the rescue
All the press secretaries I consulted remembered the bad times they had endured. John Major had Maastricht and he memorably had problems with those he categorised as “bastards” on Europe, but in Jonathan Haslam's view it was nothing like as difficult as today's “three-dimensional chess”. Major also had collective cabinet responsibility which worked and capable, loyal colleagues who would, as Haslam put it, “go out and take one for the team”.
Sir Bernard Ingham remembered “some pretty awful press” that Margaret Thatcher endured in the early 1980s and latterly, immediately before her departure in 1990, but nothing that compared to Brexit. He did, bitterly, confirm the early precedents of the Tory party's divisions of Europe during his heyday. In his view, however, May was landed with an impossible task and had thus been obliged to preside over a split Conservative Party, while faced simultaneously with a divided Labour opposition and a vindictive European Union. “If you can come up with a good idea to deal with that lot, you're a genius… Mrs Thatcher would certainly have handbagged them, but to what effect is entirely dubious.”
From an even earlier age, Joe Haines recalled that Harold Wilson had a very bad time over devaluation in 1967, albeit before he himself left journalism for Number 10 in 1969. “When I joined Harold, he said to me ‘What can you offer me?' and I said ‘Complacency. Because that's what you need’.” In Joe Haines' view, it is important for the politicians to get the policy right, but he suggested that thereafter the communications matter less. “We are seeing that in the United States, are we not? Who has got worse communications and a worse press than Trump, even though he has got a broadcaster in his pocket? But he is still riding high because a large number of the voters agree with him.”
This government and Theresa May as prime minister do not have that luxury. The electorate is restless, at the very least. Something anarchic has entered British politics and this brings us back to slowthai. His rhetorical question in the first paragraph above was, in his own way, articulating the core of the current political frustration of the British electorate. And The New York Times, by using his personal history as an illustration of the British dilemma, illuminated for its readership a telling account of the social circumstances which informs his nihilism. Slowthai is mixed race and one of five children born to a single mother, who was 16 at the time of his birth. His name comes from the nickname he was given because of a childhood speech impediment (“Slow-Ty”). He has found a sort of fame from his chosen way of life and is in the middle of an international Brexit Bandit tour, mostly in the UK but also in Europe and the US. For the price of a 99p ticket, his audience is led by him in shouted abuse of the prime minister, the Queen and, yes, Brexit. In May 2019 he released his first album, Nothing Great About Britain, a title he has taken the trouble to have tattooed upon his body. The BBC has named him in fourth place in a poll they conducted on the “Sound of 2019”. Slowthai voted to remain in Europe in 2016 and is in favour of a second referendum. He has resorted to his own route in the interim to resolve the issues in his rhetorical question.
