Labour strategists’ heads have been turned by sleaze stories. They’ve mistaken prominent media and social coverage for public interest and partisan support. Hoping to recreate the devastation caused by the “Tory sleaze” narrative in the mid-1990s, they have sacrificed clarity on their own policies and message for easy political wins. The reality is sleaze stories come and go without making any real impact on the polls at all. Let’s look at why this is.
Firstly, and most importantly, because people think politicians are “all the same”. Completely regardless of their party, voters think politicians are uniformly rich, mostly on the make, mostly dishonest, and living lives of excitement and glamour in faraway London. They think this for two reasons: because of Tony Blair’s inflated promises in the mid-1990s, and because of the expenses scandal.
It’s hard to overstate the impact of Tony Blair’s perceived failed promises. In the mid-1990s, against a backdrop of apparently endless scandals coming out of John Major’s Government, Blair cultivated an image of being decent and morally upstanding. With Shadow Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, he even promised an “ethical foreign policy”.
When it came down to it – and this happened quickly – Blair’s Government appeared no different from its predecessors. For many voters, being let down by Labour was worse than the original litany of scandals. The expenses scandal drove home this point: all this was, after all, spread across all parties.
Such was the scale of disillusionment with politicians of all parties that the expenses scandal had little discernible impact on electoral politics. I remember running a series of focus groups with disgruntled non-voters in cities like Stoke around the time of the 2010 election and being staggered by how blasé voters had become by politicians’ behaviour. Why, I asked, were they not angrier about what their MPs had done? The answer: because they’re all the same and we expected it. Politicians’ reputations could not have shrunk any further.
Secondly, most modern sleaze stories make little impact because of sheer public boredom with it all. While people were initially irritated and often angry with the stories about Downing Street “parties”, they lost interest after a while since the stories went on for many months. In focus groups in the spring of this year, people regularly and wearily said they just wanted the media to focus on other things – most commonly, the cost of living crisis and Ukraine. Such was their boredom with it all, many voters said they no longer thought the PM should resign because they just wanted the news to return “to normal” and couldn’t take yet more stories on it all.
Thirdly, impact is muted because often people don’t judge stories to be great scandals at all. I make absolutely no comment here on any particular story (and certainly not on the most recent stories), but instead make a general point: oftentimes, stories the media and other politicians judge to be truly scandalous appear to be relatively trivial to others. Most people aren’t easily shocked.
As I have argued many times, this Government’s stock started to fall last autumn because of perceived failings on important policy issues – for example, the failure to stop the arrival of small boats from France. They looked incompetent and the parties provided what looked like explanatory context: they didn’t know what they were doing.
Ultimately, this is the great danger for this Government: not that the Government looks sleazy, but that it looks incompetent and that the PM is not exerting any control. The danger is it looks like they couldn’t run a booze-up in a brewery. Labour will never convince anyone they are better people. If they work out the challenge is actaully showing they’re more competent – by having important things to say about important issues – then the Conservatives really will be in trouble. Until then, it will all just come and go.