Narrativewatch: Paul Keating's "higher calling"

The former Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, recently gave a must-read newspaper interview.  There were many interesting insights, but the media picked up on his observation that Australia’s current Labor government lacks a narrative.

"The failure of the Rudd and Gillard administrations is the lack of an over-arching story, the lack of a compelling story . . .

"I'm happy that Labor took us through this dreadful financial crisis so competently. But they are not in the business of teaching. And governments, to succeed with change, must be in the business of educating the community.

"Our Labor governments have failed to conceptualise the changes. We need a framework . . . “

He went on:

"I think the Australian people are very conscientious. During the 1980s and 1990s we proved they will respond conscientiously to necessary reforms. They mightn't like them but they'll accept them. But reforms have to be presented in a digestible format.

"I know that in the age of the internet, opinion and perpetual static it is difficult to get the message over. I accept that. But the big messages have their own momentum. If we get the story of transition right then other things will find their place."

I agree with Keating on where the Gillard government is going wrong.  But I was more interested in his take on the most basic argument about the essence of political communications.  More than that, he discussed the purpose of leadership in democratic societies. 

Should leaders act in accordance with their core values and try to shift public attitudes, in support of big changes and hard choices?  Or should they follow the basic contours of public opinion and avoid unpopular and difficult decisions?  Leaders taking the latter course may give themselves a better chance of staying in power and, just possibly, strengthening their ability to “do the right thing” in the longer term.

Keating’s answer was as romantic as it was unambiguous:

"You need a higher calling or some inner system of belief - here I mention Kant and the inner command that tells you what is true, what is right, what is good. The inner command must be the divining construct in what you do.”

And:

“In the end, everyone in political life gets carried out - the only relevant question is whether the pallbearers will be crying."

I am a long time admirer of Paul Keating and the verve with which he approaches politics.   I agree with him that politics should be about big ideas and grand visions, rather than simply following fads and focus groups.  Political leaders should have core beliefs, deep passions and big agendas. 

But what Keating calls the “higher calling” or, in other times, the “big picture”, is not necessarily the same thing as the “narrative”.  I see the “narrative” as the means by which leaders market themselves and seek electoral popularity.  Having gained power, democratic leaders use narratives in order to persuade people to follow them in a particular direction; more likely, to accept change.

Both types of narrative must be a story, with people, events and something unanticipated.  They must also evoke an emotional reaction in their audiences.

In his seminal book Leading Minds, Howard Gardner studied a number of successful leaders from a range of fields. He concluded: 

“A leader must have a central story or message.  The story is more likely to be effective in a large and heterogenous group if it can speak directly to the untutored mind – the mind that develops naturally in the early lives of children with the need for formal tutelage.  Stories ought to address the sense of individual and group identity, the “we” and the “they” thought that sense may actually be expanded or restricted by the story.  They should not only provide background, but should help group members to frame future options.”  (1)

Later, he observed:

“Leaders benefit from the ability to build on stories that are already known – for example, those drawn from religion or history or those that have already been circulated within an institution – and to synthesise them in new ways, as Martin Luther King Jr was able to do.” (2)

Gardner also argued that there would be tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary stories.  He stressed that leaders must embody their narratives to maximise the chances of success.  Recall, for instance, Churchill’s refusal to leave London during World War II.

I have argued previously that, whist all politicians and parties have narratives, they can exercise only limited control over them, a point that Keating acknowledges, above.  Moreover, politicians are most successful when they speak to the stories that are in the minds  of their target electorates – the public’s core values, Gardner’s “stories that are already known” – as well as their current anxieties and concerns about the future.  [For some examples, click here and here.]

At the same time, a successful narrative must be based firmly on a clear, coherent set of ideas. Michael Deaver once said that one of the biggest lessons he learned from working with Ronald Reagan was that:

“You've got to know who you are before you can communicate it.”

Keating’s political career, with its spectacular highs and lows, demonstrated all of these points.   He never wanted for visions and higher callings and, with Bob Hawke, sold difficult economic changes to the Australian public by levelling with people, getting out and selling their policies and, yes, telling stories.

Hawke was an effective prime minister who projected himself as a national leader, an embodiment of Australianness.  But Keating was the master of personal persuasion, using anecdotes and easy-to-understand illustrations, to show people the merits of policy changes.

In 1992, Keating, now prime minister, developed the theme of Australian national identity with his landmark Redfern Park speech on Aboriginal reconciliation.  The following year, he delivered his moving eulogy for the unknown Australian soldier.

Through all those years, he showed how “romantic” political narratives and those more concerned with political marketing can work in tandem, and how they work against and supersede one another.

And, lest we forget, Keating’s government was decisively defeated in 1996.  He had been around too long, and seemed out of touch and remote from public concerns.  The Australian electorate lost interest in his “big picture” and Keating’s narrative was no longer theirs. 

Still, I’d prefer that kind of finish to a leadership with no vision at all.

(1)    Howard Gardner, Leading Minds (Harper Collins, 1995) p 290
(2)   p.291

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Narrativewatch: David Cameron, Winston Churchill and the bulldog

David Cameron’s speech to the Conservative Party conference has had a mixed reception from political commentators.

I thought the most interesting bit came at the very end of the speech.

We can be a country where people look back on their life and say: I've worked hard, I've raised a family, I'm part of a community and all along it was worth my while. We're too far away from that today but we can get there. 

It's not complicated, but not easy either - because nothing worthwhile is easily won. But you know, we've been told we were finished before. 

They said when we lost an Empire that we couldn't find a role. But we found a role, took on communism and helped bring down the Berlin Wall.

They called our economy the sick man of Europe. But we came back and turned this country into a beacon of enterprise.

No, Britain never had the biggest population, the largest land mass, the richest resources, but we had the spirit. Remember: it's not the size of the dog in the fight - it's the size of the fight in the dog. Overcoming challenge, confounding the sceptics, reinventing ourselves, this is what we do. It's called leadership.

James Kirkup of the Daily Telegraph quickly saw what kind of story the PM was pitching.

I don’t think you have to be a historian to get the impression that Mr Cameron would like you to think about British bulldogs, Sir Winston Churchill and the war.

. . . . Mr Cameron is pitching himself as the man to lead us into the battle to come.  Quietly, he’s recasting himself, changing his role from sunshine kid to economic war leader.

As James Kirkup suggests, that’s quite a hard transition to make.

What’s more, in starting to tell a Churchillian narrative, David Cameron has taken on a big challenge.

Let’s recall the basic elements of Churchill’s wartime narrative.  In his new book, All Hell Let Loose: the World at War (1939-45), Max Hastings says:

It is hard to imagine that Britain would have continued to defy Hitler after June 1940 in the absence of Winston Churchill, who constructed a brilliant and narrowly plausible narrative for the British people, first about what they might do, and later to persuade them of what they have done.

Harking back to the Spanish Armada and invoking the myth of the “strong island nation”, Churchill declared that “we shall never surrender . . . we will fight them on the beaches”.  The goal – “victory at all costs” - was never in doubt and nearly everyone had a part to play in the war effort.  By contrast, beyond getting rid of the public deficit, David Cameron’s strategy for winning the economic war and building a strong economy, is much harder to pin down

In 1940, Churchill could rally the British public and tell them “what they might do” because it always obvious who the enemy was – a real nation with a powerful military force and a demonic leader.  In 2011, it is not so clear who or what Mr Cameron wants to lead Britain and prevail against.

All through World War II, Winston Churchill told another, parallel story – that of the strong and purposeful community, fighting together, making equal sacrifices and winning together.  According to the latest data from Ipsos MORI, seven voters in ten perceive that the coalition government’s plans to reduce the national deficit will hit poor people hardest.  People don’t think that “we’re all in this together”.  The “strong community” archetype does not look like one that David Cameron can easily deploy.

None of this means that David Cameron should give up on trying to be an economic war leader.  He and his colleague may yet devise a strategy that the public can rally behind. In any case, fast-moving events could leave them with little choice.  For now, however, these words from the PM’s closing proration may be the most instructive:

Overcoming challenge, confounding the sceptics, reinventing ourselves, this is what we do. It's called leadership

David Cameron will find that he has more personal credibility on these counts than by trying to call Churchill, Henry V and the bulldog into action.  He could re-tell and apply the stories from his own political life to illustrate what his type of leadership is about.  In this respect, Cameron could take after Churchill who, lest we forget, embodied his own narrative by staying in London during the blitz, thereby exposing himself to the risk of physical danger. 

 

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Narrativewatch: learning from Theresa May and the cat

"Facts tell, but stories sell . . . If you're not communicating in stories, you're not communicating.”

James Carville and Paul Begala, US political consultants

Politicians like to tell stories.  Anecdotes turn abstract concepts and political arguments into credible situations and events that people can understand quickly.  Anecdotes work best when they’re about people.  People relate and react to other people, their highs and lows, their triumphs and their tragedies, their achievements and their failings.  When people act, or when things happen to them, we can feel love, hate, joy, happiness, sadness, pity, longing or resentment. 

In politics, strong anecdotes prove points and prop up prejudices.  So, Ronald Reagan, the master storyteller, told Americans about the scandal of the “welfare queen” from Chicago’s south side.  He told stories about farmers, preachers, people living in small-town America and, as Dan Rather has written, the payoff usually carried a political wallop.  Reagan also told the story of the WWII bomber pilot on a doomed plane who refused to parachute because a wounded young gunner couldn’t evacuate.  OK, the last one came from an old war movie, but Reagan kept on telling it anyway.

Less memorably, Tony Blair sometimes peppered his party conference speeches with brief, oblique anecdotes to show that his government was delivering.

Which brings us to yesterday’s speech to the Conservative Party conference by Theresa May, the home secretary.  She provided an excruciating example of how anecdotes can go badly wrong in politics.   To illustrate the supposed lunacies of the Human Rights Act, a bête noire of Conservative conference goers, Mrs May cited the example of:

"the illegal immigrant who cannot be deported because—and I am not making this up—he had a pet cat."

The trouble was, she had her facts wrong.  The justice secretary, Ken Clarke, all but disowned her claim, in public and on camera.  Then, a spokesman for the judiciary said that the case she referred to involved a Bolivian man whose appeal against deportation was based on a relationship with a British woman of some years' standing. As part of his evidence to a court, he cited his joint ownership of a cat, to demonstrate the seriousness of the relationship.   The basis for the home secretary’s comment appears to have been an immigration judge's light-hearted remark about a cat no longer having to fear adapting to Bolivian mice, which was quickly seized on by right-wing newspapers.

The liberal media has hardly been able to contain its glee, especially as daily coverage of the conference rapidly became dominated by the May – Clarke, er, “catfight”.  [Click here, here, here, here and here.]

The Guardian went in for the kill:

It was an undignified episode. Doubtless some lowly speechwriter has already been handed a glass of whisky and a loaded revolver for embarrassing the home secretary. But it is Mrs May's misjudgement that matters in the end. At the very least, the woman who once bravely coined that phrase about "the nasty party" ought to learn her own lesson. She should be confronting her party's prejudices, not flattering them.

Political differences aside, I suggest there is another, simpler lesson for all politicians and their speechwriters – don’t ever rely on anecdotes unless you can be absolutely certain they are 100% fireproof. 

Ronald Reagan got away with his story about the fictitious fighter pilot, but he lived in a different political culture, in a different time, and had established a conspiracy of fiction with his constituencies.  The UK’s trip- them-up media culture won’t allow top politicians any such leeway. But then, the powerful and those who aspire to lead us should be held to account for the claims they make.

Remember how, in 2000, Gordon Brown, the then chancellor, used Oxford University’s decision to exclude Laura Spence to highlight the bias in the university system against working-class applicants.  He was soon shown not to have been in full possession of the facts.  Later, successive Conservative leaders, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, both made claims that specific people had been poorly treated by the NHS, only to see the stories fall apart. 

And, right back in 1992, Labour’s general election campaign became bogged down in the war of Jennifer’s Ear -- though that argument was also about the ethics of involving a (named) young girl in a political campaign.

Mrs May is not the first politician to be discover the downside of a faulty anecdote.  I’m sure she won’t be the last.

  

 

 

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Narrativewatch: the coalition government tries to woo women

 

Today, The Guardian’s astute political correspondent, Allegra Stratton, has an interesting article about the coalition’s new attempts to reposition itself with women voters.  The need is clear.  Last month, an Ipsos MORI poll found that men were more dissatisfied than satisfied with the government, by a margin of 21%.  Among women, the figure was 33%. 

But what to do about it?  Allegra Stratton picks up on the distinction between a narrative based mostly on ‘values’ and one based more on ‘policy’ and suggests that the government wants to try a bit of both, but without backtracking on the debt reduction strategy – the heart of its programme.

[There] will be a process of reintroducing the PM to women. In Downing Street they like a story about Bill Clinton reaching out to soccer moms – in this case he banned tobacco advertising next to schools. Tobacco advertising is already banned in the UK but you get the point. One option here is to ban cynical advertising aggressively targeted at children.

Watch out for these and other issues: expect Cameron to criminalise forced marriages sometime soon. That's also why you will hear the prime minister close the conference by talking about something his coalition partners, the Lib Dems, opened their conference with: that gay couples would be able to marry, not just enter civil partnerships. Cameron will remind the country why the policy is important to him, and what social mores are important to him.

Some of his own female MPs think this doesn't cut the mustard and hanker for more substantial overtures. No 10 aides will point out that the theme of the autumn – a clampdown on the something for nothing culture – is something women want. They caution that the debate about scrapping the 50p tax rate must also be seen in the light of how it will play with women – again, badly. "It matters to women that the top 10% are paying a heavy chunk of tax. We have to really underline 'we're all in it together'," one adviser said.

There’s more.  Opinion polls show that women are more downbeat than men about the economy and  focus groups suggest that they are more likely to be worried about cuts in government spending.  The government’s problems with women are more fundamental than the strategists seem to acknowledge.  (For further analysis and comment, click here and here.  But note also this backgrounder from Ipsos MORI.)

Allegra Stratton concludes:

The great face-off between Cameron and women is uncharted politics: a strategy testing heavily the personality and personality of the prime minister himself.

I’d go even further than that.  The government is trying to ‘change the subject’ with women, and invite them to look past its core narrative, that above all, the deficit must be all but wiped out during the life of this parliament. 

I doubt that any government in modern times has pulled off such a political feat.  If his emerging "gender gap" strategy succeeds, David Cameron will be one of the greatest political communicators this country has ever seen.  The coalition’s efforts to woo back women voters provide a narrative case study that is going to be well worth watching.

 

 

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Ed Miliband's narrative failure

Every year, the media and the political class get themselves well and truly worked up about party leaders’ conference speeches.

They seem to forget that most voters hardly notice these performances. The party activists have almost always forgotten them by the time they get home. There are usually sound reasons why this is so.

Still, a leader’s conference speech provides the scribes with a quick and easy barometer of how well a party leader is performing. With luck, they and the activists will pick up some clear signposts as to where the leader wants to take the party next. More likely, the speeches typify how badly a leader is performing. Remember Iain Duncan Smith’s cringe-making declaration to the 2003 Conservative conference that “the quiet man is turning up the volume”.

Yesterday’s speech by Ed Miliband mattered, because he desperately needed to define his vision for the Labour Party and for Britain and, with dismal personal poll ratings, to present himself as a credible prime minister. The consensus in today’s media is that, not to put too fine a point on it, the speech was a dog. (See, for instance, Paul Waugh of PoliticsHome, Andrew Gimson in the Daily Telegraph, and Michael White in The Guardian.)

Some of the commentary is too harsh. Yesterday, Ed Miliband explained how he will try to reposition Labour. He sided with the "wealth creators" against the "asset strippers". There was a good, Clintonesque pitch to the “squeezed middle” -- "the people who don't make a fuss, who don't hack phones, loot shops, fiddle their expenses or earn telephone number salaries at the banks". Ed Miliband spoke of a tough, new stance on public spending. And it was back to Beveridge – yes, what Beveridge actually said- with talk of rewarding responsible people who work hard and contribute to society with higher housing priority and better benefit entitlements.

But there was no narrative. (If you want to know how I define a political narrative, and why I think it matters, click here, and here.) Ed Miliband says he knows what he wants – an end to the “something for nothing society” and a new type of social democratic prospectus. His ambitious speech tried to map out a long term project, to remake Britain’s economy, along continental “social market” lines.

The Economist’s Bagehot columnist says:

Well, those bold ideas were in the speech, if you knew to listen for them. But somewhere along the line, Mr Miliband seems to have lost the will to explain what he was up to, out loud and in full. . .

And:

These are bold ideas [on industry policy and taxes and dividends], and it would have been helpful if Mr Miliband could have spelled out more clearly what he really intends to do . . .

. . . There were a host of other areas in which Mr Miliband started to say something clear and bold, only to dive for the safety of waffle.

He’s quite correct. Much of the content was very tentative, and the Labour leader shied away from making specific ideas and proposals, and from telling stories about how they would work for people. You can’t have a story without an ending and in political narratives, the people listening want the ending to be a happy one. Ed Miliband showed yesterday that political marketing is not as divorced from belief-systems and policies and it may sometimes seem.

The second, admittedly more tentative, explanation for the speech’s failure concerns political values. Bagehot makes another interesting observation:

. . . Mr Miliband's speech was intended to hold up a mirror to the British public, and explain to them how their own existing values were his values. [This] sounded like a belief that the centre-ground of British politics had shifted towards Mr Miliband, merely described a different way.

The result was a lot of painful straddling . . .

. . . This was a left wing speech, in many ways, but sounded like a right wing speech a surprising amount of the time.

I have argued many times that politicians’ narratives only work when they speak clearly to the values of the people they are trying to convince. Bill Clinton’s much misunderstood “triangulation” is a good example. Bagehot may be right about Ed Miliband’s assumption, but the centre ground may not have shifted in quite the way that the Labour leader may think. That’s a discussion for another day.

There’s a more immediate challenge for the Labour leader. Ed Miliband didn’t sound completely confident yesterday about whose values he was speaking to - the values of the people in the hall, or those of the people watching tv at home. The end result was a sense of fuzziness, something a “defining narrative” can never suffer from.

The way Ed Miliband sounds, and the voters’ sense of him, brings us to the third and most brutal explanation of why his attempt at presenting a narrative didn’t come off. The public and the media simply don’t take him seriously. Last week saw the release of new research commissioned by the former Tory party treasurer Lord Ashcroft. The words focus groups used to describe David Cameron were "determined", "competent" and "ruthless". The word they volunteered for Ed Miliband was "weird".

In today’s Guardian, Jonathan Freedland says:

Put simply, my fear is that you can make all the speeches and policy statements you like – carefully devising a strategy on this and crafting a narrative on that – but what matters more are shallow considerations of looks, demeanour, speech patterns and biography. That, in short, it is personality, not policy, that counts . . .

. . . [This] is the problem for Ed Miliband. He is a decent, clever man but he does not look the part. He looks too young; he looks more like the speechwriter than the speechgiver, an adviser to the leader rather than the leader. That could change; he might grow into the role over the next three-and-a-half years.

Ed Miliband may know what he stands for, what he wants to do. But the counter-story about him is much, much more powerful and keeps on overwhelming the Labour leader's halting attempts to explain who is and what he is about. And, although Jonathan Freedland wants to cling on to hope, the counter story shows no sign of changing.

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"Competence with a conscience" - how well is Nick Clegg's narrative working?

“Competence with a conscience” sounds like a good, comfortable narrative for the Liberal Democrats.  But the voters don’t seem to be buying it.

 

Nick Clegg’s narrative to market the Liberal Democrats and our role in government was summed up in his speech at the National Liberal Club in May. The speech marked the first anniversary of the coalition’s formation.

 

At the next election, we will say that we are demonstrably more credible on the economy than Labour, and more committed at heart to fairness than the Conservatives. I am confident that by showing we can combine economic soundness with social justice – competence with a conscience – we will be an even more formidable political force in the future.

 

These themes are elucidated in Nick’s foreword to the Facing the Future paper, to be considered by the party conference this week.

 

For the conference season, Populus has produced its latest findings on how the parties are perceived by voters.  The results aren’t exactly encouraging for the Liberal Democrats. A useful summary comes from Anthony Wells of UK Polling Report:

 

Historically these Populus questions tended to show that the Lib Dems had the positive party image. That is no longer the case. They have the least positive score on every measure except being for ordinary people [with 45% agreeing it applies to the Lib Dems], where they at least beat the Tories [with 30% agreeing].

 

This is very important – and very worrying.  In the run-up to the last general election, the image of “being for ordinary people not the best off” was, with a reputation for being honest, one of the party’s most positive brand assets.

 

We have often heard the argument that being in coalition would make the party more credible to voters.  Once they saw us delivering in government and taking the hard decisions, voters would take the Liberal Democrats more seriously  – the “competence” part of Nick’s desired brand.  But Anthony Wells explains:

 

On having a good team of leaders [the [Lib Dems] are on 31% (down 13 since last year), on sharing peoples’ values they are on 36% (down 5), on being honest they are at 35% (down 6), on competence they are at 31% (down 10), on party united they are at 27% (down 13), on having clear ideas they are at 31% (down 11). In most cases the party’s ratings had already dropped sharply last year following their decision to enter the coalition – these falls are on top of that.

 

Then, Wells rams the point home:

 

In summary, go back a couple of years and people tended to give the Lib Dems the benefit of the doubt, there was a tendency for people to assume they were good, honest and caring people (even if other polls also suggested people rather doubted their policies would work or they had any chance of actually winning). That positive party image took a knock after the removal of Charles Kennedy, but was on its way to recovery by 2009. Since then it has fallen through the floor.

 

 

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The comeback cop: Brian Paddick's ground-breaking mea culpa story

Congratulations to Brian Paddick, who will be the Liberal Democrat candidate for London mayor in 2012. He is being re-used as a candidate, despite his poor campaign in 2008, when Paddick’s slogan, “a policeman, not a politician”, turned out to be all too true.

Now, in winning the Lib Dem nomination, Paddick has performed an epic feat in political storytelling. Announcing his candidacy back in June, Paddick gave us this carefully crafted mea culpa:

The 2008 campaign was a bitter and bruising experience. I had just left the police over the shooting by armed officers of the innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell. It was a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’. I was an uptight, politically naïve ex-police officer with no experience of party campaigning or working with activists. I got a lot wrong.

The campaign slogan then was ‘Serious about London’ . . . but I was far too serious about everything. I was terrified of Punch and Judy, of Paxman and Sopel and I had unrealistic expectations of what to expect from the party. I was, quite frankly, a bit of a pain! Towards the end, particularly in the televised debates with Comedy and Tragedy, critics said I performed well, but we need a candidate who gets it right from the start. Crucially I know my enemies from last time, up close and personal! . . .

Then, Paddick developed his theme of the “new me”.

. . . So what is going to be different? A few weeks ago I was in the office of a London MP who commented on how much I had changed since 2008. I am much happier, more relaxed, more realistic and more experienced now – I have even been spotted smiling in photographs! I have spent the last three years campaigning with ordinary members, delivering ‘Good Mornings’, knocking on doors, talking to voters, addressing rallies and speaking at fundraisers. I have attended every Federal Conference since 2008 and either spoken in debates or contributed from the floor. I know the Party now. I didn’t know the Party then

I didn’t go to any of the hustings, but by a number of reliable accounts, Paddick embodied his narrative but seeming cheerier and more focussed and confident than before.

Annette Simmons has explained how “mea culpa” stories work:

When you tell a “mea culpa” story about your own mistakes first, it cheats your adversaries of the opportunity to discredit your intentions and polishes your reputation at the same time.(1)

Until Paddick’s flash of genius, the best example I knew of a “mea culpa” story in politics was the one told by Bill Clinton - the original “comeback kid” - in 1982. Two years earlier, Arkansas voters had evicted the wunderkind from the governor’s mansion. They were angry with Clinton for putting up car licence fees and for seeming out-of-touch and inaccessible. No less than the rest of America, Arkansas was racked by an economic woes and a growing sense of unease in 1980. The state’s voters were hugely disgruntled with Jimmy Carter’s administration and the political toxins spilled over to Democrats in general.

Five months before polling day, several hundred Cuban refugees broke out of their resettlement camp at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas. Not long before the election, Clinton agreed to pardon dozens of violent criminals. The Republican candidate exploited these developments to associate Clinton with a sense of disorder and disarray – and his friend in the White House.

Early in 1982, Clinton was back, seeking once again the Democratic nomination for governor. At the urging of his campaign guru Dick Morris, Clinton made two campaign adverts, one apologising for the car license fees hike and the other apologising for pardoning the violent crims.

In his biography of Bill Clinton, David Maraniss wrote that:

In the end, Clinton managed to say that he was sorry without saying that he was sorry. He did by using down-home Arkansas language. When he was growing up, Clinton said, his daddy never had to whip him twice for the same thing. If the voters gave him another chance, he said he would never make the same mistakes again. He had learned that he could not lead without listening . . .

. . . What the public saw was that Clinton was chastened. Political observers had never seen anything like it – someone announcing for governor via a thirty-second commercial, and doing so with an apology. But the strategy was apparent: By admitting his mistakes and seeking absolution before the first tough question of the race could be asked, Clinton was able to say that criticisms of his previous actions were irrelevant.(2)

As we know now, Clinton was restored to the governor’s mansion in November 1982, after bitter primary and general election campaigns. The “mea culpa” ads bombed at first, but they eventually immunised Clinton against his opponents’ attacks.

Paddick’s “mea culpa” is in a different league again. Clinton was implicitly apologising for forgetting about the people who had elected him, and for making the wrong decisions. Annette Simmons’ suggested uses of “mea culpa” stories recall occasions in which people didn’t follow their values and principles, or when they failed to take up a challenge or to seize an opportunity. But Paddick was saying sorry (sort of) for not even being competent as a candidate when he last had the chance. Astonishing.

Still, failed ex-candidates and empty suits may want to think carefully before trying this one at home. The narrowness of Paddick’s victory suggests that other factors, such as the opportunities afforded him by “hackgate” and the August riots, were decisive too. Liberal Democrat selection campaigns for London mayor are strange beasts, as the party seeks out a mega-campaigner who can rally the troops and pull in more assembly members by his/her coat-tails. This time, the dynamics were mixed up even more by the entry into the race of the former Montgomeryshire MP, Lembit Opik. (In defeat, Opik had his own "comeback narrative" in which he compared himself to Nelson Mandela, but that’s just too dreadful to discuss in detail.)

For now, I’m left wondering once again why Liberal Democrats are so skilled at telling stories to win internal party elections [click here], but so poor at telling stories to “people out there”. Maybe Brian Paddick’s campaign for 2012 will confound me again.

(1) Annette Simmons, Whoever Tells the Best Story WINS (Amacom, 2007) p.70

(2) David Maraniss, First in His Class: a Biography of Bill Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 398-399