Sam Delaney - Madmen and Badmen: What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising

For
Baz and Lenny

When Margaret Thatcher died, the ad executive Maurice Saatchi made a rare television appearance on Channel 4 News to talk about his time working with her. The presenter, Jon Snow, wanted to know exactly how Saatchi had used the dark arts of adland to transform Thatcher from political outsider to iconic leader. But Saatchi surprised Snow by insisting that he really hadnt done much at all. He said that it was Thatchers ideas and leadership style alone that won her success and acclaim. The presentation techniques devised by him and the ad agency he ran with his brother Charles were neither here nor there. On a good day we would be a footnote in her history, but thats all, he said.

Well, you cant simply say that she was such a great philosopher and politician that [you] didnt need to do anything, insisted Snow.

Thats exactly what Im saying, said Saatchi.

Are you saying that presentation isnt important in politics? asked Snow.

Yes, I am, responded Saatchi firmly. Which was a bit strange.

*

Saatchi & Saatchi has been synonymous with the Conservative Party, and Mrs Thatcher in particular, since the late seventies. In fact, the agency made its name by working for the party, creating iconic campaigns that heralded a whole new approach to political communications. Its association with Thatcher put it on the map, helping it win more acclaim, awards and business than it knew what to do with and, in no time at all, grow into the worlds biggest ad firm. Even today, Saatchi & Saatchi remains the only ad agency ever to have become a household name. Some might say Maurice Saatchi owed it all to Mrs Thatcher. And here he was suggesting she owed him nothing.

Perhaps he thought it was inappropriate to take any credit for her success in the immediate aftermath of her death. Maybe he felt he had little to lose in admitting after all this time that advertising was, just as so many businesses and politicians had always suspected, a complete waste of time and money. Saatchi was now rich enough to never have to make another ad for anyone ever again. But most probably he was, like any good adman, continuing to loyally serve his client even after she had stopped breathing. A great adman will never take credit for a clients success. The emphasis must always be on the quality of the product.

I wanted to find out if Saatchi was telling the truth when he said all of his well-paid work for the Conservative Party had been totally pointless. If that turned out to be true, it would make for a brilliant story. Now I dont want to ruin the ending of this book, but I can tell you that Maurice Saatchi was, at the very least, exaggerating to make a point. I spent the next six months or so speaking with all sorts of admen, politicians, academics and commentators. Some of them said that the Saatchis had too much influence, others that their influence has been wildly exaggerated. But the only person who said Maurice Saatchi was irrelevant to the Tories success was Maurice Saatchi himself.

The role that he, and numerous other admen, played in political combat between the late seventies and late nineties was unprecedented. This was a period in which politicians became besotted with admen, spin doctors and image makers, convinced as they were that the acceleration of mass communication made an award-winning adman as crucial to their political armoury as a decent policy advisor.

Admen would eventually enter the very heart of the political hierarchies within both the Labour and Conservative parties. In many cases they went beyond just communicating policies; they were also involved in devising the policies themselves. That they were involved is a matter of fact; whether their involvement had any practical impact is difficult to determine. But that was broadly what I set out to do simply talk to the individuals involved, both politicians and admen, and ask them what difference they thought advertising made to election outcomes.

But I wanted other questions answered too, questions like: what happens when stuffy politicians and swishy admen collide? Ill be honest, this was one I was particularly keen to resolve. My first book, Get Smashed, was about the rise and rise of the British ad industry from the sixties through to the eighties. It was the story of how a rag-tag band of scruffs and smart-arses staged a coup in adland, rising from the post rooms to the boardrooms of agencies and revolutionising the industry for ever. They were young, usually uneducated, mostly working-class and uniformly wild and reckless in their behaviour. Irreverent, long-haired, cocksure and drunk more often than not, they made London the advertising capital of the world, earning the sort of money and having the kind of adventures that usually only pop stars could dream of. This was the world that Maurice Saatchi and his brother Charles grew up in, a world that seemed far removed from the one occupied by politicians.

I had had my own experiences of the ad industry. When I was a kid I used to sometimes go and visit my dad at work. I lived in the suburbs of west London with my mum, who worked as a secretary in a local building firm. My impressions of the grown-up working world were mostly based on her office, which was a bit dreary the sort of place where everyone had one eye on the clock all day. So when I first got the Tube to the West End to visit my dad at the ad agency he had started with his brother, I was astonished. Their building was in Covent Garden, surrounded by Italian cafes and trendy clothes shops. His office was painted in bright colours; it smelt of fresh coffee; it was full of really attractive women and flashy blokes who just seemed to sit around drawing and taking the piss out of each other all day. They always went out to restaurants for lunch and drank wine. It didnt seem like work; it seemed like a ludicrous Shangri-La where people got paid for pissing about.

That said, I didnt fancy it as a career. My dad taught me that advertising might be a lot of fun, but it was basically pointless. He was with Maurice Saatchi on that one. The only time he seemed to take his work at all seriously was when he worked pro bono for the Labour Party. It was ironic that he worked for free because trying to make the Labour Party popular in the eighties was probably one of the toughest briefs in the history of British advertising.

Politics, by comparison to the ad game, seemed both exciting and important. When I was a kid I devoured shows like Yes Minister, Spitting Image and House of Cards (the original one, with Ian Richardson). The latter depicted Westminster as a seductive and mysterious world where silvery-haired gents struck shadowy deals over large glasses of whisky in oak-panelled rooms. I liked the look of it. So after Id finished my A-levels and before I went off to study politics at university, I got a work-experience placement as a researcher at the House of Commons. For six months I worked in the parliamentary office of Harriet Harman, the MP for Peckham and a member of Labours shadow cabinet. I did a lot of photocopying and tea-making but very little to justify my admittedly ostentatious use of the title researcher. There was certainly not much in the way of silvery-haired gents striking shadowy deals. I occasionally entered an oak-panelled room but was never once offered any whisky. All in all, I found it a bit of a let-down. The offices were more akin to those of my mums building firm than my dads ad agency. There was the occasional errand to be run in the Commons itself, but the MPs offices were all based in buildings dotted around Westminster that were significantly less imposing. There were a lot of worn-out carpet tiles and cold, dimly lit Victorian corridors that smelt of bleach. At lunchtime we all ate sandwiches from Boots at our desks and drank watery coffee from a vending machine. There wasnt much in the way of horsing around. This was the biggest difference between politics and advertising: in advertising, no one seemed to take anything seriously; in politics (especially Labour politics) everyone took everything seriously. And why shouldnt they? They were trying to work out how best to run the country, not just dreaming up a new slogan for a brand of fabric conditioner. Daily restaurant lunches accompanied by wine probably helped my dad and his colleagues fan the flames of creative whimsy, but that sort of carry-on would have been unlikely to have helped the minions in Harriet Harmans office devise a new VAT policy.