Conservative Party, Britain

The Conservative Party, or Tory party, was formed in the late 19th century, and it has shared power alternately with the Labour Party for most of the 20th century. Since 1945, it has been in office for two long periods: 1951 to 1964 and 1979 to 1997. The latter period is particularly significant as it includes the 1979 to 1990 period when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. The Conservative Party's dominance in the 1980s and 1990s also marked a period in which there were some significant developments in political communication. Moreover, it was a period in which television gradually overtook the press as the new means of mass communication and began to challenge the dominance of the political system. From a different perspective, one could also argue that politicians were beginning to learn to use the media to their advantage.

In the immediate post-1945 period, it was generally acknowledged that the Conservative Party was better organized to exploit the media to its advantage. Unlike the Labour Party, it had no reservations about using outside professional help in achieving its goals, and it was not until the mid-1980s that the Labour Party began to challenge the dominance of the Conservatives. A good illustration of the Conservative Party's use of professionals is the employment in 1948 of Colman, Prentis, and Varley (CPV) to design and place advertisements on its behalf. The use of CPV reflects how the party was able to draw on lessons from the world of business and advertising to achieve its objectives.

Despite these advantages, the party lost power in the 1964 election to a Labour Party with a more modern leader, Harold Wilson, and it was to remain in opposition until 1970. After another period out of office, the party returned to power in 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. In many important ways, Thatcher brought about a change in the way media-politics relations developed. A few examples will illustrate this claim:

• Thatcher famously used Gordon Reece to advise her on how to modulate her voice for public speaking.
• The party successfully used publicists Saatchi and Saatchi in the 1979 election to produce campaign advertising material, some of which is still considered to be of high quality (see http://politics.guardian.co.uk/election2001/images/0,449826,00.html).
• At a different level, Thatcher employed Bernard Ingham as her press secretary from 1979 to 1990. Ingham was the political (lobby) journalist's bête noir in the 1980s. He used the lobby skillfully to carry out the prime minister's wishes, to bully journalists, and to knife ministerial colleagues in a fashion that occasioned both admiration and hostility. In some respects, he can be seen as a predecessor of Tony Blair's Alastair Campbell in the ways in which he ably controlled the flow of information to the media.

The fall of Thatcher in 1990—at the hands of the party—gave John Major an opportunity to lead the party to victory in 1992, but an economic crisis in 1992 and much scandal paved the way for a modernized and slick new Labour Party, under Tony Blair, in 1997.

The end of the Thatcher period created a major political problem for the Conservative Party as New Labour gradually eroded its traditional middle-ground and middle-class appeal. Its efforts to redefine and to reposition itself brought nothing but failure: It lost [Page 131]three elections in a row (1997, 2001, and 2005) under three leaders, William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard. The 2005 election was lost in spite of the employment of the Australian professional campaign manager, Lynton Crosby, to help run the campaign.

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