Fisher - Celebrity politics

CLARE FISHER examines the impact of the cult of celebrity on British politics, and discusses the wider trends behind this phenomenon

It would be entirely reasonable to assume that a broadsheet report on Gordon Brown’s party conference speech and an exposé in Heat concerning Victoria Beckham’s recent acne outbreak bear little relation to each other. However, they perhaps have more in common than one might expect. They both contain a lot of speculation about the possible motivations of the said subjects without placing them in a much wider context. Gordon Brown’s speech was just as focused on anecdotes, such as being given some beer by an NHS nurse, that were almost as trivial and meaningless as Victoria’s “acne crisis” itself.

This does not appear to be an isolated incident. Flick through the Sun, the Mail or the Times (the former two publications having some of the highest readership figures in the country), and stories about celebrities and politicians are freely intermingled. The inheritance tax issue for example might be reported on the opposite page to a (much longer) feature about Terry Wogan wearing slightly too tight trousers.

When political issues are covered, they are, like articles about soap stars, accompanied by large colourful pictures of the PM and occasionally one or two other ministers. Articles and television features about prime ministers’ fitness regimes, sex lives and iPod choices are becoming more abundant. Chris Horrie, media expert and author of Tabloid Nation and several other books about modern British media culture, takes this even further. He told me that he believed that “politicians are just celebrities. They are the stars of a TV show called the news which has fewer viewers than most soaps.”

A prime perpetrator of this kind of journalism is the Londonpaper, a free newspaper distributed around the capital in the evenings and which, like the Sun and the Times, is owned by Rupert Murdoch. An advertisement for the position of news editor of the paper read as follows: “candidates need to have a thorough grasp of hard news and showbiz. Applicants will need insider knowledge of what makes the greatest city in the world tick.” This seems to sum up the recent convergence between ‘sleb and “serious” political journalism; not only are the two now on an equal footing, but the latter is now conceived of in the manner of the former; everything is one juicy scandal to be revealed, and inner feelings and motivations are to be teased out. Even London is characterised as a giant personality that needs to have its private spaces made public.

The political establishment seems to be very much aware of the importance of image, personality and private lifestyle choices in relation to political power. Tony Blair had weekly meetings with Rupert Murdoch and Brown has followed suit. Lord Falconer, whilst commenting on the snap-election fiasco in October, gave The Guardian a thoughtful nugget of political philosophy: “political leadership requires not just an ability to deal with the present. It also requires the ability to convince the public you lead that your vision of the future is one they share.” This is little more than a slightly veiled way of saying: “in order to be a good leader, Gordon Brown must be a good propagandist.”

Policies and ideas are words that are rarely used. Instead, Labour ministers and media commentators alike frequently refer to Brown’s “vision” and “performance”. If politics is now all about personal “visions” then it is about irrational beliefs gained from the “inner” faith of the prime minister in-whom-we-trust, rather than about rational, reasoned policies and ideas based on evidence from a wide range of sources. If politics is also about “performances”, then it is, as Lord Falconer admitted, all about creating an image, a veneer. Never mind the reality that lies beneath it.

So how did we arrive at a place where the bread-and-butter of celebrity journalism - private scandal, image and personality - are fast becoming the hallmarks not only of political journalism, but of the very working of the political system itself? Chris Horrie attributes this development to the proliferation of television since the 1960s. “Television is a stupid medium. It has no depth or analysis about anything…Everything that TV touches turns to crap. It is reduced to an undifferentiated outpouring of drivel.” Whilst one could protest that this assessment is too unforgiving, pointing towards quality political broadcasts such as Question Time and searching documentaries, such programmes are few and far between, especially in the age of Digital and Sky.

However, the rise of the television over the past fifty years is very much connected to another development over this period: the increasing cultural and political influence of the US over the UK. Horrie pin-points the obsession with the Kennedys as the start of the “celebritisation” of the political world, and cites Reagan as the first example of a politician who existed solely to be “made up for TV”. At that time, the UK was populated by less TV-savvy politicians such as Thatcher and Michael Foot, whereas our new generation of politicians such as Blair and Cameron have followed in the wake of American politicians who are “made for TV”.

Whether or not these developments have convinced the British electorate, a recent study conducted in the US suggests that this could be true across the Atlantic. A significant proportion of participants said that the primary factor in choosing a presidential candidate would be whether they thought they could have a beer with them. Thus personal characteristics and psychological well-being triumph over ideas in determining political power.

This points towards another key aspect of the US’s cultural influence over us: the phenomenon dubbed by Horrie as “psychiatric imperialism”. The high value placed on psychiatric analysis has impacted on British society and politics so that now the actions of all public figures are analysed psychiatrically. “You get people staring at a picture of Cherie Blair looking nice in a bikini and wondering whether this says something about the Blairs’ sex-life, and then whether this might suggest that Blair might have some sort of psychological disorder that might affect the political decisions he is making.”

The differences that can be observed between the attitudes to celebrities and politicians in Britain and in continental Europe help illuminate the issue. The British media’s obsession with celebrities and the personalities of politicians is unparalleled in the rest of Europe which has, until recently at least, been subject to a far lesser degree of cultural influence from the US. Danish journalist Kirsten Sparre said that whilst living in Britain in the 1990s she “was very surprised to see how much the media focused on the ability of individual politicians to uphold ‘family values’ and the titilating coverage of the Conservative MP found dead in stockings and with an orange in his mouth.”

Furthermore, she said that research carried out in Denmark by a range of media outlets, including broadsheets, tabloids and celebrity magazines concluded: “stories about the personalities and private lives of politicians were too boring and not worth doing because the audience is not interested.” She said that this is still true today, but that there is a growing market for global celebrity news, such as the exploits of Britney Spears. This would suggest that the more recent nature of American cultural influence over Denmark is partly responsible for the more recent, and less extensive, appearance of interest in celebrity.

Yet could this also be a result of the economic differences between Denmark and Britain? Whereas Britain was early amongst European countries to reorganise their economy along neoliberal lines and develop a very consumer-focused society, most other European countries, including Denmark, did so to a much lesser extent, at least until recently. In Britain we are obsessed with the improvement of the individual, both on the inside and the outside. TV programmes abound telling us how to improve our clothes, our houses, our children, our marriages, our “well-being”. Is it any wonder we have become so obsessed with the personal characteristics of our politicians? Chris Horrie agreed there was a connection in this direction: “We live in a narcissistic society. We have seen a gradual dissolving of the distinction between the public and private spheres due to free-market ideology.”

However, this disparity may also be a result of the differences between the UK’s and the US’s political systems on the one hand, and those of continental Europe on the other. The British and American systems are focused around the quasi-sovereign offices of the prime minister and the president, and around the battle between two parties for power. In contrast, many European countries have systems like proportional representation or a more developed federal system, meaning that far more political parties help shape the agenda.

Kirsten Sparre considers the differences in electoral systems to be the prime reason for the UK’s and Denmark’s differing attitudes to their politicians’ private lives. “Denmark has a multi-party system where anywhere from six to twelve parties are represented in parliament at any given time and changing cross-party coalitions are formed around different political issues. The political culture is simply ‘rounder’ than what I see and saw in Britain, which is dominated by conflict and confrontation. In Denmark most people think that politicians are approachable people very much like themselves, whereas in Britain the political world is more of a television spectacle that you cannot interact with. Politicians become cartoon figures that you can talk about and pin many stories on without feeling that you hurt them. They are not real in a sense, and it becomes easier to get close and knock them down a peg or two or altogether if you want to.”

This suggests that the huge image-generating behemoths accompanying the major parties in the UK and the US have in fact achieved the opposite of what they set out to do. By focusing so much on the image and personality of their leading figures they have shrouded them in even greater mystery and suspicion, rather than convincing people that they are nice guys really.

So not only do the reports of Gordon Brown’s speech and Victoria Beckham’s acne have more to do with each other than we might hope, the rise of the celebrity raises a number of important issues about how we have arrived here and where we are going. Do we want to continue to ally ourselves, on both a political and cultural level, with the US rather than Europe? Should we restructure our political system? Should we even make changes to our economy? Unfortunately these questions have little chance of being answered whilst everyone is rushing to find out how Lindsey Lohan has broken a nail or what colour socks Brown wears in bed.

Clare Fisher is a second-year undergraduate studying modern history at Exeter College.