When in 2016 we went to vote in the EU Referendum there wasn’t a Centrist box to tick. It was a binary choice – In or Out. And that set the tone for what has happened since. Everything has become binary. You are for us or against us. Nuancing and subtlety has vanished.
Jeremy Corbyn has threatened to form a political Party that is the Left’s equivalent of Reform. Hard Left to their Hard Right. The Conservative Party which John Major (just) succeeded from shifting to the Nationalist Right has in the last twenty years done just that. So far Keir Starmer has managed to keep Labour Centre Left and won an election on such a platform. And the LibDems election success showed that votes can be secured for an avowedly Centrist position – and seats to match if you know what you’re doing. Which, unlike Reform, they did.
Hard Right or Hard Left have a raw appeal that is simple to grasp. So in the minds of the Left the NHS is being privatised (it isn’t). And in the minds of the Right immigration is out of control (it isn’t). There are few media spaces for centrists. Moderation is for wimps.
The “third way” of Blair and Clinton is little promoted though it’s very much still around in Britain , if not in America. If Starmer can find a way to unravel Brexit despite having promised not to the Centre has a chance to regain its hold again. A chance.
“At the general election, [Nigel Farage’s] latest startup, Reform, won five seats from 4,117,610 votes — nearly half a million more votes than the Liberal Democrats, who ended up with 71 seats. Such are the vagaries of Britain’s first-past-the-post system.”Iain Martin in “The Times”
Yes FPTP stinks but it wasn’t its “vagaries” which gave the LibDems their triumph , it was brilliant election planning. The Party studied the constituency make ups and identified those where that make up gave them a chance of winning. They focused their efforts entirely on these constituencies – primarily in areas where the social construct would not be likely to turn to Labour but could be persuaded to vote LibDem, and they did.
The LibDems vote share national roughly matched their seat share. An unprecedented result in British politics. Effectively an outcome that a fairer voting system than FPTP would have given them. It helped that Ed Davey turned himself from a bit of a nonentity into a likeable figure.
Reform, an insubstantial political brand but a refuge for (mostly) disaffected Tory voters, had no local structure to bring out the votes and win more than a handful of seats. Yes they should have had more MPs (as should the Greens) but the local organisation wasn’t there. Will Mr Musk’s millions help Reform create that structure? It’s perfectly possible. Combine that with Farage’s charisma and familiarity and they become a genuine threat.
1970 in Britain is a foreign country where they did things differently – I know, I was there! It was the year I graduated and started work and the year after I got married. No escaping the reality of adulthood. The “Swinging Sixties” might technically have ended, but the carry over went on a long time.
Murray Head’s character is my exact contemporary, Glenda Jackson’s the (slightly) older woman we all lusted over and Peter Finch’s the symbol of the sexual revolution that decriminalising homosexuality had legitimised. Actually the Ménage à trois is also a mirror of change. It’s presented by Director John Schlesinger openly but in no way intrusively. Jackson would prefer to have Head for herself, as would Finch but they both reluctantly settle for sharing him.
If sex is at the heart of the film other emotions are very visible. Loneliness. Ambition. Fear. Sadness. This is a tour de force. These are three bright intelligent people living in an imperfect world. When Jackson has a one night stand with a troubled client it’s not just kindness that drives her – there’s a rather sad urgency to her decision. It’s actually rather caring and almost matter of fact.
The family portrayed is truly ghastly – modern parenting of those times leading to noisy, spoiled brats. You sense that the three principals are very relieved that they avoided that !
Jackson and Head cope with the dreadful children dumped on them for the weekend
The direction and performances are impeccable as is the cinematography. The print I saw recently on television was perfect. So fifty years on has the movie relevance for us today – and not just for aging juveniles like me? I think so. It is an accurate portrait of morality and priorities in a time of change. For the movie buff it’s a reminder of how good in particular Jackson and Finch were. A truly fine film.
In the past there were three main brands taking place here:
Fairly clear you might think. There was the “Royal Opera”. There was the “Royal Ballet”. And there was the venue itself – the “Royal Opera House”. In the unlikely event that you’re struggling to get it one is an Opera company, the next is a Ballet company and the third is where most of their productions take place. So why have they recently created this, a fourth brand, and what does it mean?
The answer, I fear, is that it means nothing. And a brand that means nothing, and that you can’t relate to is, frankly, a waste of time. Of course we know that there is some overlap between the Opera company and the Ballet company – they share an orchestra, for example and they perform in the same venue. But the Ballet offer and the Opera offer are entirely separate. We buy one, or the other, or both if there is a production or productions we want to see. But we don’t buy “Royal Ballet & Opera”.
The new brand is actually a corporate descriptor rather than a proposition for prospective customers to relate to. Yes there is a measure of integration – the ticket office sells both ballet and opera tickets for example. But that is just efficient admin. We go to the “Royal Opera House (brand!) to see the Royal Ballet (brand!) or the Royal Opera (brand!). We don’t go to see “Royal Ballet & Opera”. You can’t buy it actually.
The Royal Opera House has a distinctive brand offer as an extension of its identity as a performance venue. You can eat and drink and shop there without needing to attend a performance. That’s part of the Royal Opera House’s brand proposition.
The explanation given for the change you can read here . In my view as a Brand practitioner it makes little sense. As I say they have complicated unnecessarily the three strong brands that have served them well for decades. They should think again.
What is England, who is she? Well it’s quite simple really – England is Britain without the Celtic bits. But when, for example (there are many), John F Kennedy wrote his Harvard thesis “Why England Slept” he meant the whole of the UK . Churchill also often used the descriptor “England” but he generally meant all of us in these islands.
England/Britain is self governing at Westminster except that the Land of Hope and Glory it governs contracts out some of the governance of Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland to local parliaments. But only some. There is an element of “Home Rule” but on the international stage we are one State, and key elements of that State are integrated. The rule of the Bank of England, for example, extends beyond the nominal borders of historic England.
The pride of the Scots and the Welsh is strong and their cultures distinctive where the culture of England is hard to define, if it exists at all. English pride really only asserts itself in sport – otherwise English Nationalism is as obtuse as it is unnecessary.
England is remarkably diverse, as large countries generally are, but the definition of what is a “Region” is arbitrary. There is some unitary distinctiveness in East Anglia or the North East for example. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that there should be home rule and regional parliaments.
The concept of “subsidiarity” in Europe is to “guarantee a degree of independence for a lower authority in relation to a higher body or for a local authority in relation to central government.” For EU members the main application is to protect national or regional autonomy vis-a-vis Brussels. But though the UK is no longer part of the EU subsidiarity as a concept still has relevance.
In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland the “lower authorities” had to be created – thus elected assemblies (or parliaments) in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast. But no such logic applies in England. There is no tradition of regional governance and other than in the cities no consistent and established delegated structure.
Many cities do have Mayors but even in London the extent of delegation to them is limited. There are also so-called “combined authorities” with mayors such as in the “West Country” and the “West Midlands” . Again these are arbitrary in definition and limited in authority.
So England is a confusing and confused country with a Parliament which includes representatives from Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland who can vote on matters that are purely English in scope and application. And the application of subsidiarity is equally random. Governance reform, along with electoral reform is long overdue. Don’t hold your breath!
There are three possible outcomes in Ukraine. (1) Russia wins and takes over the whole country (2) Ukraine, backed by the West, wins and kicks the Russians out. (3) There is a realpolitik negotiated settlement under which Ukraine cedes some territory to Russia.
When you think about it only outcome (3) is feasible. The Korean model if you like. In Korea the Chinese backed North was countered, in the end, by massive “UN” forces (mainly America) and stalemate resulted. The US could, as General MacArthur (amongst others) wanted, have used nuclear weapons. The fear of this helped formalise the stalemate. Again there is a parallel in Ukraine.
Some would say, with some justification , that a negotiated settlement would reward Putin’s aggression. But in truth the East of Ukraine is quite culturally and linguistically Russian. Although this has a whiff of Sudetenland logic to it redrawing the borders is just about defensible.
South Korea has gradually become a sort of mini Japan retaining its culture but conforming to the democratic and economic norms of the West. For Ukraine to formally become a participative European state, a member of NATO and the EU (etc.) would despite its loss of territory arguably be a satisfactory outcome.
The supply and demand of energy is quite complex. You cannot, for example, decouple EVs from the electricity production and supply chain. A third of our electricity is currently generated from fossil fuels (Gas) for example. So for a third of journeys in your EV you are simply transferring the pollution upstream.
The progress towards renewables for power generation has been commendable and will continue. However significant parts of our overall energy consumption mix are “oil specific” and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Aircraft and Ships and much of the Commercial Road Transport sector cannot change from oil. Even a quarter of our trains run on diesel and to replace them with the greener electric trains requires a substantial investment in transmission systems.
Natural Gas which replaced coal, and in some cases oil, in industry (etc.) is also unlikely to be replaced by renewables for some time. Hospitals, for example, will have Gas-fired boilers for years to come. And space heating in the home will be reliant on gas for decades.
Much of the “debate” about the need to switch from fossil fuels to greener energy is depressingly ignorant. If ever there was a subject requiring an understanding of the “Art of the Possible” its energy. It’s sadly lacking.
Paper for: “Noël Coward: Past, Present and Future” University of Birmingham
How Noel Coward and David Lean held a mirror up to middle-class Britain in the inter-war years
“Brief Encounter” is arguably Noel Coward’s most widely seen and popular work. But it’s more than just a romantic story. Coward was not indulging overtly in cinema verité revelations, creating a faux-documentary or being political. Towards the end of his life, he said “I’ve had no social causes. Do I have to? I wanted to write good plays, to grip as well as amuse”[1] . But Coward’s acute understanding of the English class system, and the genius of David Lean, combine in “Brief Encounter” to tell a layered but understated story in which character, norms, propriety, events and, especially, language reveal the truths lurking below the veneer of convention. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
The contemporary Times reviewer of “Brief Encounter” in 1945 said that the film “shows Mr Coward more as a serious psychologist than as a flippant commentator”[2]. Nine years earlier in 1936 The Times theatre critic had said that in “Still Life” Noel and Gertrude Lawrence (who played Laura) “… discarding their usual airs and graces, play … with a deliberate colourlessness which draws from the play its last ounce of emotion.” That “colourlessness” is reflected in the film by the use of black and white (a very deliberate choice – Lean and Coward’s previous collaborations “This Happy Breed” and “Blithe Spirit” had both been in colour). Pioneering film critic C.A. Lejeune summed up what many felt about “Brief Encounter” “It is, to my mind, not only the most mature work Mr. Coward has yet prepared for the cinema, but one of the most emotionally honest and deeply satisfying films that have ever been made in this country.”
The film, as with all movies, was a collaborative effort. David Lean’s biographer Kevin Brownlow says that Anthony Havelock-Allan, on Coward’s production team, claimed that “…Noel Coward did not write any of the script [it] was written by David, and myself and Ronnie (Neame)”[3]. In fact, of course, there was plenty of pure Coward from “Still Life” in it and much of the new dialogue was either his or a sort of ersatz Coward of which he approved “Which of my little darlings wrote this brilliant Coward dialogue?” he said at one point. Lean himself said “Luckily, Noel proved to be very good at adapting his plays to the screen. We worked with him, of course [but] the dialogue was always his.”[4] “Brief Encounter” is authentic Noel Coward and, as Barry Day says, the screenplay “…was Noel’s crowning achievement on film.”
In this paper I explore the extent to which the characters are imprisoned or freed by the conscious and/or unconscious characteristics of their social class. This includes looking at the counterpoint between the claustrophobically middle-class Alex and Laura, on the one hand, and the freer working-class Albert and Myrtle on the other.
In his definitive survey of Class structures in Britain[5] David Cannadine describes the inter-war years in Britain as a society that is “quintessentially middle-class”. When G.D.H. and Margaret Cole surveyed the “Condition of Britain” in 1936 they divided the social order into the “Rich”, the “Comfortable” and the “Poor”. “Still Life”, the play on which “Brief Encounter” is based, first appeared in that year and is mainly about this comfortable (and for some, aspirational) increasingly dominant middle. Evelyn Waugh, looking at it from above in “Brideshead Revisited”, describes how the historic hegemony of the Aristocracy was giving way to “The Age of Hooper” – modern, technocratic, and overwhelmingly middle middle-class.
“Brief Encounter” can be seen as a story which holds a mirror up to the ubiquity of middle-class sensibilities of the times. It is not to denigrate Alex Harvey nor Laura Jessop and her husband Fred to describe them as bourgeois. Nor is it insulting to observe how the working-class Myrtle Bagot’s attempts to be “Refined” (or “refained”) is aspirational. When “Brief Encounter” first appeared in November 1945 the anonymous reviewer in “The Times” described Alex and Laura as “Upper middle-class”. For that reviewer it was insufficiently accurate to describe them as “Middle-Class” (which they indisputably are) but further to specify that they are at the upper end of it. Noel says that Fred was a Senior Partner at a firm of Solicitors and Alex is a doctor and a graduate of Aberdeen University. Their status as qualified professionals place them at the upper end of the Middle-class stratum. Laura’s class is determined not by her own family background but by her husband’s. There is no evidence either in “Still Life” or in “Brief Encounter” of Laura ever having had a job. She married at 22 and had two children rapidly. She is, in Noël’s description, a “pleasant, ordinary married woman”. Laura’s friends, or acquaintances like the intrusive Dolly Messiter, come from the same social milieu as her.
If the characters are firmly Middle-class with servants and with shared social mores and values so was Coward’s audience as Frances Gray points out in her insightful “Modern Dramatists” book. “The rich might be silly, the poor might be vulgar… but the middle classes, the backbone of Coward’s audience… were the guardians of order, decency and the family… if they could control their unfortunate passions and come through to do the right thing”[6]. The view that Coward’s main audience was firmly middle-class is reminiscent of Terence Rattigan’s “Aunt Edna” who he described as “…a nice, respectable, middle-class, middle-aged, maiden lady, with time on her hands [who] enjoys pictures, books, music, and the theatre…”[7] In Laura’s case the library books are paid for from Boots, not free from the public library, and she has a “penchant for a particular kind of middlebrow fiction aimed at middle-class women” as Richard Dyer (in his BFI Film Classic book on “Brief Encounter”) puts it.[8] Dyer also quotes Nicola Beauman, founder of Persephone Books, who says that Laura’s reading has a presumption that “marriage and passion are irreconcilable: you can’t have the thrill of romance and the comfort of ordinary life”. Dyer says the film presents this in definite class terms “such irreconcilability is a middle-class dilemma”
Time and place are crucial to the story. Time is quite difficult. The film was made in early 1945 and premiered in November that year – close still to the end of a war which directly touched everyone in Britain. Coward was deliberately telling a story set in a more “normal” and peaceful world. In “Still Life” Coward says “Time – the present”, that is to say early 1936. But in the “Brief Encounter” filmscript it is said that “… this film takes place during the winter of 1938/39”. This is, I think, problematic. Is the idyllic and peaceful almost complacent world portrayed really believable as being in the high stress times after Munich? I think that Coward and Lean were deliberately making a film to mark the end of the war without mentioning it. War and rumours of war were avoided. That said there is a strong element of “fin de siècle” about the film. In 1945 it was not just the war that ended but it was also the triumph of the “Age of Hooper” with the election of a Labour Government with a substantial majority. Although this happened after the film was finished by November, when it was shown, change to the social order was very much underway.
Laura and Alec in suburban Ketchworth
If the time is somewhat imprecise the place rather less so. Ketchworth, Chorley and Milford are fictitious places, but we know them and where they were. We are in Southern England – the scenes and, above all the way the characters speak and behave tell us that this is outer suburbia or just beyond, probably in Surrey or Kent. In describing Alec Noel says that he is researching his special subject [pneumoconiosis] at Milford “as there are coal mines [nearby]”. This I think we have to take as poetic licence though at a stretch we could say that the location is near Canterbury or Ashford where some of the Kent coalfields were. Philip Hoare[9] says that the station was “probably based on Ashford” the nearest station to Coward’s home Goldenhurst.
The station scenes at Milford Junction were filmed, of course, famously at Carnforth Station which is near Morecambe Bay and not far from the Lake District. But neither the story nor the characters are in any way “Northern”. There is minor confusion from the fact that the platform notices (behind Laura when Alec tells her about the job in South Africa) still show the next train’s destinations as “Hellifield, Skipton, Bradford, and Leeds”. This was, I think, an editing mistake. Also, in the film script Albert is described as having a “North Country” accent. In fact, Stanley Holloway speaks with a fairly neutral southern accent, only just (and not very convincingly) borderline Cockney. No northern vowels at all and not characteristically “Working-Class”. Similarly, Joyce Carey’s Myrtle is not trying to refine a Yorkshire accent but a working-class southern one.
Carnforth location shot
A recent study[10] has shown that the UK has some of the highest levels of accent diversity in the English-speaking world. The study showed that accents “reflect differences in what region people come from, their family’s social class background, their age and their current professions.”. Celia Johnson’s Laura speaks in an up-market Received Pronunciation (RP) voice which rather confirms the Times’ reviewer’s description of “Upper Middle Class”. It is, I think, Ms Johnson’s natural speaking voice. Born in Richmond Surrey and educated at St Paul’s Girls’ School she was part of what her daughter and biographer Lucy Fleming calls a “comfortable, respectable, Edwardian, English middle-class family” and “very, very English”. Kevin Brownlow says, “from the moment the idea [of Brief Encounter] took shape [Lean] and Coward wanted Johnson to play Laura Jessop.” Her impeccable middle-class background and accent determined the social positioning of Laura. Trevor Howard’s Alec has a less mannered RP voice, more neutral than Johnson’s, but still solidly complementing his upper middle-class vocation.
Coward had been stung by critics who detected in “This Happy Breed”, a previous collaboration with David Lean, “an attitude on my part of amused patronage and condescension towards the manners and habits of suburban London.” “Suburban London” is, here, a euphemism for “Working class”. Of course, the social milieu in which he was most comfortable was that of “Hay Fever” and “Private Lives” set towards the upper end of the social spectrum. But Coward also wrote well, if not so frequently, about people at a more humble level and three of his films with Lean (“Blithe Spirit” the exception) have working class or lower middle-class characters in them. Which brings us to Albert and Myrtle and Stanley and Beryl in “Brief Encounter”.
Albert and Myrtle
In “Still Life” in the Methuen Edition the first three pages of dialogue are these four Station employees. And throughout the play, and later to a lesser extent in the film, these characters act as a necessary positioning counterpoint to Alec and Laura. However, they are often forgotten in popular descriptions of “Brief Encounter”, and they are not universally liked nor thought necessary. David Lean disliked them “They embarrass me every time I see them” he said, but Coward wished to retain them believing that the story would be “intolerably sad without those scenes”.
The social positioning is that the relative freedoms of behaviour and expression of Albert and Myrtle show up the excessive restraint of Laura and Alec. Here there are echoes of Present Laughter which appeared a few years before the film. In “Present Laughter” the libertine actor Garry Essendine has a working-class valet called Fred who has a girlfriend called Doris of whom Essendine, rather satirically, accuses Fred of “taking advantage”. “Why not?” says Fred “I like it, she likes it and a good time’s ‘ad by all!” The parallel with “Brief Encounter” is clear and even more so in “Still Life” where Stanley says that Myrtle is “… out having a bit of slap and tickle with our Albert”. So, whilst Alec and Laura are showing middle-class restraint Albert and Myrtle are getting on with a relationship and enjoying it. The social limitations imposed on Laura and Alec by their class and situation means that they are not, in Laura’s words “…free to love each other, there is too much in the way”. They know that if they “followed their secret heart”, as Noel had put it in a song in “Conversation Piece” in 1934, it would be a scandal in their 1930s suburban middle-class world. So, they become “Suffused with restrained emotion” in Philip Hoare’s words.
This restraint is not a common moderation on Noel Coward’s part – his plays ooze sex! Is there anywhere, for example, in the pre-war years a sexier play than “Private Lives”? There are casual liaisons everywhere in Coward amongst his beautifully described theatre people and the upper class or upper-middle class world in which they live. At the beginning of “Present Laughter” the Deb Daphne phones her friend Cynthia to tell her about what is later described as “losing her latch key” to Garry Essendine. So, we have the “Rich” happily “scampering about” as Liz in Present Laughter puts it, the “Poor”, like Essendine’s “Fred” and Myrtle and Albert in “Brief Encounter” doing much the same. It’s only the “Comfortable” in the middle, like Laura and Alec, who miss out! And suffer guilt into the bargain. For them “Marriage is the fatal curse” and “Love crucifies the lover” (as Noel put it in “Bitter Sweet”)
Oliver Soden’s new biography reminds us that “Noel’s own family had placed a great emphasis on gentility” and that his mother, Violet Veitch, believed that diction was important – her upbringing was in “Genteel poverty” with the emphasis on the genteel. They may not have had much money, but they spoke well and had the attitudes of the newly emerging middle class, not aristocratic but not from the working class from which Myrtle aspires to escape either. This “middle-class morality” dilemma echoes George Bernard Shaw who coined that phrase in 1912 in “Pygmalion” in which the working-class Alfred Doolittle lives a life free of it in the same way that Albert and Myrtle do. “Doolittle is delighted that his job as dustman is so low on the social class scale that it has absolutely no morals connected to it.”[11] They cannot afford to be moral, so they are not bound by any rules or standards
That other indicator of class and status dress is also crucial in “Brief Encounter”. A study[12] of dress norms in the inter-war years said “…for white-collar employees and their wives seeking to demonstrate their status …wearing gloves and a hat when outside the house was a prerequisite. Gloves were essential for a woman as a symbol of “gentility,” the mark of a lady who had no need to work …. hats mattered a great deal for men. Wearing a trilby was a way of signalling “I am not working class.”. In the film Laura nearly always wears a hat and gloves and in Coward’s description “Her clothes are not particularly smart but obviously chosen with taste.” Alec always wears a suit, collar, and tie and usually a trilby as well – even on and in, the boating lake!
In describing the differences between the classes “Brief Encounter” is quintessentially Home Counties English and as Richard Dyer puts it has “… a voice of the BBC, of our déclassé monarchy, of Churchill during the [war] which has often presented itself as the voice of the nation” “Narrow and class-specific” perhaps but what passed in those monocultural times as the quintessentially English “national culture”. Barry Day says “… Europeans generally couldn’t understand why Alec and Laura hadn’t gone to bed together”[13] and that further underlines the distinctive middle-class Englishness. Laura’s sense of guilt, even to the extent of contemplating suicide, is excruciating at times. Not just guilt about her unconsummated passion but about trivial things like the cost of the “terribly expensive” birthday present for Fred about which she needed to “square her conscience” and in buying she had “committed [a] crime”. Or her belief that “Upstairs is too expensive” at the cinema. The language here reveals the restrictive norms of her class in which extravagance is a sin and white lies are permitted to cover up embarrassment. Self-denial is a virtue.
Looked at from today “Brief Encounter” is a great film because like all the very best works of fiction it holds a mirror up to the social and behavioural mores of the times in which it is set. That past is a foreign country to us today and middle-class morality has mostly disappeared. Writing on the use of the Rachmaninov second piano concerto, so essential to the film, Oxford’s Dr. Leah Broad says, “Just as in Brief Encounter, by the 1940s Rachmaninoff’s music had come to symbolise something of an escape from encroaching modernity.” I think that the film can indeed be seen as an escape from the changes clearly underway when it appeared in November 1945 and after the Labour landslide election win that year. Perhaps, also, our modern-day love of the film is based on nostalgia for a past that those of us of a certain age have seen vanishing in in our own lifetimes – in the same way that we also turn to Rachmaninov for harmony and romance in a divided and dissonant modernist world.
The US Presidential Election of 1960 was the first of the mass communications age. When Dwight Eisenhower was elected in 1952 around 20 percent of American homes had a TV set. Ten years later, nearly 90 percent of homes had one. Along the way, and especially in the Kennedy v Nixon election of 1960, television became the main tool of political campaigning.
In his seminal book on the 1960 election, “The Making of the President”, Theodore White showed how the extensive TV coverage of the campaigns was crucial, In particular the televised debates between the two candidates affected the outcome in Kennedy’s favour.
Electioneering changed dramatically as television ownership became ubiquitous. Where previously candidates’ rallies were seen only by those attending them now they were live in prime time.
Political advertising, mainly on television, grew enormously in the 1950s and as TV ownership increased its reach was by 1960 almost to the entire electorate.
A TV commercial for JFK in 1960
In effect politics became a branch of the communications industry and candidates became brands. By 2024 the marketing of the candidates was in technique and delivery no different from the marketing of fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). Many of the elements of the pitch for, say, Coca Cola were identical to the pitches for Trump and Harris. The jargon of branded marketing, the idea of the “Unique Selling Proposition “ (USP) for example , were important elements of the campaigns.
Visual Identity and familiarity are key aspects of brand differentiation and again this equally applies to political brands and especially to politicians. Name recognition is crucial as it is in the branded product world. Without its brand name (etc.) Coca Cola is just another sweet fizzy drink. Add into that name recognition a strong emotional USP and you potentially have a winner. Coke’s use of the 1971 popular song “I’d like to teach the world to sing” appealed to the emotions – it said nothing about rational product attributes. It didn’t need to.
I’d like to teach the world to sing
In the post war era only three incumbents in the Presidential race have failed to be elected if they stood – Jimmy Carter (1980), George Bush senior (1992) and Donald Trump (2020). In brand terms choosing the familiar, the incumbent, is more common than choosing the new. But performance can matter and both Carter and Trump lost in the main because their presidencies were seen to have failed. Bush lost because Ross Perot, a third party candidate, took nearly 20% of the vote – mostly from natural Republican voters.
Roll forward to 2024 and to the decision of the incumbent Joe Biden not to stand. His presidency was generally seen to have been a success and normally a second term would have followed. With Donald Trump securing the GOP nomination Biden was, one factor aside, a logical choice. He had beaten Trump by over 7m votes in 2020. There seemed no reason why he could not do it again. Except, that is, for his age (82) and some superficial signs of failing mental capacity.
In retrospect the replacement of Biden by Kamala Harris was a fatal error by the Democrats. What name recognition Harris had was limited and she was seen to have contributed little to the success of the Biden administration in which she was Vice President. She was largely unknown – not the first Veep to suffer this fate!
Harris ran an excellent campaign along with Tim Walz, an inspired choice as running mate. The contrast with Trump was huge. We saw the ex President bumbling on stage and spouting inanities. The irony was that whilst Joe Biden had been discarded because it was perceived that he might have early onset dementia Trump’s public appearances were consistently demented ! Harris, by comparison, was bright, coherent and rational. She built her brand well in a short time. Or so we thought.
So why did Trump beat Harris? Again FMCG marketing can help us understand. Trump was by some margin the more familiar brand. Here a couple of quotes can help us. Oscar Wilde – “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” – and the Donald had certainly been “talked about ! The second quote is attributed to Phineas T. Barnum, the 19th century circus owner “There is no such thing as bad publicity” And Trump has had plenty of that!
So does content matter or are we only selling the image – “Where’s the beef ?”. In the recent campaign the policy proposals were minimal from Harris (who focused on the risks of electing her opponent ) and often deranged from Trump. “We will immediately stop all of the pillaging and theft. Very simply: If you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said , and that was far from his only insane proposal.
So has one collection of brand values put together as an ideology triumphed over another ? Up to a point. Trump’s choice of JD Vance as Vice President suggests that the hard right Project 2025 ideology will influence policy strongly. If Trump is only capable of inanities (a take out from the campaign) then Vance and his friends will do the policy bit. And they have majorities in the Senate, the House and the Supreme Court to help them
Trump will soon be the incumbent again and there seem to be few checks and balances to restrain him. The election suggests that in brand terms he has achieved, improbable though it may seem, what Kevin Roberts of Saatchi and Saatchi has called “Lovemark” status: “… loyalty that goes Beyond Reason?” Roberts was, of course, talking mainly about FMCG brands
Lovemarkbrands
The idea of “loyalty beyond reason” is in a cynical age unlikely, especially for a politician! Loyalty to Trump may not last and of course he hasn’t persuaded all the people all the time. But, again, he doesn’t need to. The triumph of identity and polemics over ability and substance should make us all uncomfortable. We live in interesting times !
Anyone writing about “America” as if it was a homogeneous whole with a high level of sovereignty and a universal culture is heading down a blind alley. It’s the most diverse, culturally mixed and economically divided nation on earth. Even Disraeli’s “Two Nations” descriptor doesn’t come close to describing it. It’s far more than two.
The US was created by immigration and the sentimental idea of a uniting “melting pot” is fading away. The Hispanic population (63m) is now large enough and confident enough to represent a distinctive Spanish speaking minority that has less need to assimilate than in the past. Other minorities are also flexing their muscles.
50m Americans are of African heritage (black) and like the Hispanics they have built their own identity and culture. Black Lives Matter in more ways than one. Successful Afro-Americans in business and politics (etc.) detach themselves from this. Neither Obama nor Harris has much in common with others of their ethnicity.
The determination of all America politicians to eschew a welfare state means that poverty is rife. Life expectancy in prosperous states is eight years higher than in Mississippi. To understand why many Americans voted for Trump, and will again, visit the boondocks of deprived America. It’s a protest against power and privilege – they’ve nothing to lose. Ironically many with that power and privilege will vote Trump as well! He’s built an unlikely and intellectually bereft coalition.
Paddy’s Blogs in a crazy world 