By boosting his staff in Downing Street with a personal photographer and his own video-blogger David Cameron has jeopardised one of the coalition’s most successful pr strategies, the story line that the new government had turned its back on spin.
Of all the narratives which have strengthened Cameron’s media image, perhaps the most surprising has been the proposition that the coalition has succeeded in running the country for the last six months without the propaganda and deceit which so damaged the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. But the hiring of Andrew Parsons, already dubbed Cameron’s vanity cameraman, and his personal video-maker Nicky Woodhouse, is the kind of action which could demolish the credibility of the spin-free reputation which the Prime Minister has been trying to sustain for the coalition. Far from enhancing his image, vanity pr can only end in grief. The image of Cameron with his own cameraman in tow is a gift for the cartoonists and sketch writers; the spectacle of a Prime Minister forever looking out for an adoring camera lens will live on in comedy routines. The first six months of the coalition have been something of a master class in presentation. While any new government can expect a honeymoon with the news media, Cameron and his colleagues have continued to command the agenda, successfully trailing their policy announcements in a way which has sustained the media’s focus on the government’s policy objectives. But the idea that coalition government has marked the end of spin could not be further from the truth. The analyst David Jones of IG index could hardly have put it any more succinctly: financial markets were unmoved when the Chancellor George Osborne announced the harshest spending cuts in decades because ‘with all the leaks beforehand there were no surprises’. What has been so remarkable about the first six months of the coalition is that it has managed to promote and sustain several key narratives: the public are happy with way the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have put their differences aside in an attempt to govern the country; there is an acceptance that it was the reckless spending of the Brown government which necessitated the cuts; and it is benefits abusers and welfare scroungers who are as much to blame as the bankers. David Cameron launched the Sun’s hotline for benefits cheats last August with a signed article (‘People will not get away with fraud’ Sun 12.8.2010). In subsequent weeks most of the tabloids have followed suit publishing daily stories about benefits scroungers. This has fed through to the rest of the news media and is a regular topic on radio phone-in programmes. Having shown his understanding of the true test of today’s spin doctor – the ability to leak and trail in advance shifts of government policy – Cameron’s decision to shoot himself is even harder to understand. He must have realised that by taking on a personal photographer, video-maker and super stylist for Samantha Cameron and putting them on the Downing Street payroll, he would end up being portrayed as just as tacky as Tony and Cherie Blair. Cameron is paying the price for having granted the media – especially press photographers and television crews – unprecedented access to his home and family life when he was campaigning to become leader of the Conservative Party. He said then that the public had a right to ‘know quite a bit about you, your life and your family’. Now that he is in Downing Street he wants the same kind of images delivered to the news media but equally he knows that photo-opportunities for Prime Ministers have to be closely controlled.Cameron has shown more than a touch of arrogance in expecting the taxpayer to foot the bill for a vanity pr team; grief, not gravitas, will be the end result. (Nicholas Jones spoke to Clare Politics, Clare College, Cambridge, 8.11.2010)