In 1964, Lyndon Johnson’s campaign for the White House released a TV ad, “Daisy”, which became legendary among political campaigners. A little girl is sweetly plucking petals, before a countdown begins and a mushroom cloud fills the screen. When LBJ won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, the advertising industry claimed that Daisy had proved that negativity works. This must be the belief of whoever issued Labour’s new attack ads against Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. But gutter politics can turn people off, too.
Labour’s Twitter campaign is rather less subtle than “Daisy”, which didn’t mention Goldwater himself. “Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison? Rishi Sunak doesn’t,” reads one, which also claims that “Labour will lock up dangerous child abusers”. Not only is the ad clearly misleading about Sunak, it also blames him for a (sensible) policy of not jailing everybody which arguably has more to do with Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who was Director of Public Prosecutions when Sunak wasn’t even an MP.
While some shadow cabinet members expressed concern, and former home secretary David Blunkett was “close to despair”, others are said to be pleased that the ads have got so much attention. Sunak is much more popular than his party, they say, so it makes sense to go after him.
Labour is not the first to get personal. This new ad feels like payback for Boris Johnson’s disgraceful parliamentary attack on Starmer, whom he wrongly accused of having failed to act against the paedophile Jimmy Savile when he was DPP. Johnson’s policy chief Munira Mirza quit over the then prime minister’s refusal to apologise for the slur, writing in her resignation letter that “this was not the normal cut-and-thrust of politics”. Mirza was right: parliament is adversarial, but Johnson brought politics to a new low. The dislike which many viewers express if they see clips of baying MPs at Prime Minister’s Questions makes me think they will be unlikely to thank either party for upping the ante on nastiness.
Yet the belief that negative campaigning works is pervasive. When I started as a journalist at The Times 20 years ago, I was surprised to find that any meeting we had in Downing Street with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown or their aides would involve questions about The Sun, our sister paper. Labour was haunted by the belief that The Sun had cost them the 1992 election for the Tories with its notorious headline, “If Kinnock wins today, will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights”.
My Sun colleagues enjoyed the notoriety, but privately believed the claim was overblown. Their paper reflected the views of readers, who had already turned against Kinnock just as American voters had already abandoned Goldwater by the time “Daisy” was aired.
This has not stopped the advertising industry capitalising on the hopes and fears of politicians — who lean heavily on the murky ecosystem of pollsters and campaigners. Conservative guru Isaac Levido is spoken of in the kind of hushed, reverential tones once used for Peter Mandelson.
Negativity can succeed if it crystallises a doubt in voters’ minds. Saatchi and Saatchi’s “Labour isn’t working” slogan, accompanying a picture of a long queue at the Jobcentre, supposedly put James Callaghan off calling an election in 1978. (Margaret Thatcher triumphed the following year). But the idea that Sunak doesn’t care about child abuse is hardly credible.
Plenty of negative ads have backfired or had no effect: the vile Tory poster “New Labour New Danger” in 1997 that portrayed Blair with “demon eyes”; the attack on Brown in 2010, pictured saying, “I let 80,000 criminals out early: vote for me”, or Labour’s weird attempt in 2010 to portray David Cameron as an 80s throwback TV detective. It led, in the best traditions of British humour, to a Conservative counter-campaign — “fire up the Quattro”.
Humour is sadly in short supply these days — unlike personal attacks. Both parties have focused on crime in recent weeks, knowing it is an issue floating voters care about. But neither are being entirely honest. The government promised to crack down on antisocial behaviour but the police already have powers to do so. Labour claims it will do better, but is not clear how. Jacking up minimum sentences is one of the laziest, most populist things governments can do, undercutting the discretion of judges. Johnson did so in his Police, Crime and Sentencing Act, and now Starmer is following suit. Yet the independence of the judiciary is a precious part of our constitution, not to be sacrificed for a cheap headline.
Whatever the effect on voting intention, these unedifying battles are likely to have one result: accentuating the public feeling that things are bad and getting worse, and that no politician can be trusted. Given Labour’s strong polling lead, it might be wiser to tell a positive story about what it will do in office: Ronald Reagan’s 1984 “Morning In America” speech is a classic of the genre. Johnson as prime minister and Brexit campaigner used upbeat messages successfully. While Vote Leave may have benefited from the (misleading) claim that Turkey was about to join the EU, what cemented its success was probably the false promise that Brexit would put £350mn a year into the NHS.
There is no sign of negative tactics abating before next month’s local elections. But the return of gutter politics is dismaying. One of the risks to all parties in 2024’s expected general election is low turnout, because voters can’t stand any of them. In that case, the only winner will be “none of the above” (and some ad agencies). The loser will be democracy.