In this year’s battle of party conference slogans, Sir Keir Starmer is hoping voters will have come away from Labour’s annual jamboree in Liverpool believing that he rather than Rishi Sunak represents "Britain’s future".
Last week in Manchester, the Prime Minister sold an updated message for the Conservatives in the buildup to a potentially epochal election next year.
After 13 years of Tory rule, Mr Sunak is rather audaciously portraying himself as an agent of change in contrast to the “flip-flopping” Labour leader, using the message “Long-term decisions for a brighter future.”
“I would be amazed if that resonated in a focus group,” Luke Tryl, director of the think tank More In Common, told the Standard after Mr Sunak was accused of undercutting his own “long-term” message by curtailing the HS2 high-speed rail line and diluting net zero action.
“But it may not actively hurt, unlike Rishi telling voters to ‘hold your nerve’. That went down really badly,” Mr Tryl commented.
“What has worked for the Tories is their attacks on Keir Starmer for not standing for anything, which are cutting through.”
Sir Keir strove to recapture the narrative of change and renewal under the slogan “Let’s get Britain’s future back”, unabashedly draping his conference stage in the Union flag.
Not everyone was convinced. One senior Labour figure said it “didn’t quite make sense grammatically”.
But the leader’s team are banking on the spirit of their new messaging cutting through with voters and overcoming cynicism and apathy about politics in general.
“We all need the ability to look forward – to move forward – free from anxiety. That’s what getting our future back really means,” Sir Keir said in his conference speech, once he’d taken off his glitter-strewn jacket and rolled up his shirt sleeves.
No form of words from the Tories has yet hit home with voters as much as the Brexit referendum slogan of “Take back control”, which Mr Tryl says enjoyed “the ultimate cut-through”.
“But the public just aren’t tuning into the politicos any more,” he added.
“Until people feel better about the economy, until they don’t feel forced to put items back on the supermarket shelves or can get a GP appointment when they want it, it doesn’t matter what Rishi Sunak and the Tories say.”
Mr Sunak sought to make a virtue of the slogan’s wordiness, after he was introduced on stage in Manchester by his wife Akshata Murty. He told cheering Tory delegates that she was “the best long-term decision for a brighter future I ever made”.
Prof Peter Bull, a chartered member of the British Psychological Society and an expert on political psychology, said the gold standard of election sloganeering remains Margaret Thatcher’s pitch in 1979 that “Labour isn’t working”, shown over a picture of a long dole queue. (The ‘unemployed’ were actually members of Hendon Young Conservatives drafted in by the ad men at Saatchi & Saatchi.)
“Successful sloganeering is short, it’s memorable, it plays into the wider political times and offers voters a clear benefit - the perfect example of that is ‘Take back control’. There was also Tony Blair’s slogan in 1997: New Labour, New Life for Britain,” Prof Bull said.
“But messaging can backfire if it doesn’t seem credible,” he added.
The Conservatives in 1997 portrayed Blair on posters with red eyes, claiming: “New Labour, New Danger.” Voters didn’t buy that demonic portrayal of John Major’s fresh-faced challenger.
In 2005, the Tories under Michael Howard went with ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’. The country’s answer was a resounding no, and Blair was re-elected to a historic third term.
By 2015 the Conservatives were back in power but bidding to break free of their coalition with the Liberal Democrats with the manifesto promise of “strong leadership, a clear economic plan and a brighter, more secure future.”
Its wordiness didn’t stop David Cameron scoring a surprise win. Mr Sunak will be hoping that history repeats itself next year.
But to paraphrase a classic advertising strapline from the 1990s, for the phone company Orange, Sir Keir is hoping instead that the future’s bright, the future’s red.
