Political Imagery in the British General Election ... - Wiley Online Library

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856X.2011.00452.x

BJPIR: 2011 VOL 13, 474–489

Political Imagery in the British General Election of 2010: The Curious Case of ‘Nick Clegg’ Katy Parry and Kay Richardson This article examines the figurative appropriations of Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg, drawing on a selective audit from newspapers, television, radio and blogs during the 2010 general election period. The flurry of excitement produced by Clegg’s sudden visibility during the election campaign offers a unique opportunity to observe the hasty moulding of a new political persona. Across the mediascape, political commentators and humorists employed an expressive range of critique and humour to reflect on Clegg’s new-found appeal. We present analysis of the various mediated attempts to ascribe to Clegg certain characteristics and values through the use of labelling, metaphor and other popular culture allusions. It is especially in the unpicking of the prevalent sexualised metaphor that our research prompts wider queries about the current mediation of British political culture.

Keywords: Nick Clegg; metaphor; election; political communication

Introduction In this article, we examine the figurative appropriations of Nick Clegg, the leader of the British Liberal Democrat party, within the British national mediascape during the period of the 2010 general election. This election was unusual in a number of ways. The campaign introduced the innovation of televised formal ‘Leader Debates’ in the American style, while the unprecedented outcome was that neither of the two main parties won an overall victory. According to a number of commentators, perhaps with a dash of hyperbole, the realms of both politics and political communication in Britain were transformed. A Daily Telegraph editorial went so far as to claim: ‘It is quite possible that, in the future, textbooks will be written and university courses taught on the subject of “British politics: 1945–2010”’ (Daily Telegraph, 15 May 2010). Early academic assessments agree that the election was both ‘fascinating’ and ‘remarkable’ (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010, 330), not only in campaigning terms but also with implications for the British parliamentary system (Geddes and Tonge 2010, 281). During the campaign, the traditional hegemony of the Labour and Conservative parties appeared to be challenged by an enthusiasm for the Liberal Democrats (Lib Dems), the ‘third party’ in terms of overall national support. Part of this enthusiasm was refracted through depictions of the Lib Dem party leader, Nick Clegg. In © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association

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tracking the figurative appraisals of Nick Clegg across the political mediascape during the election campaign period and subsequently in the forming of a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservative party, this study offers a complementary approach to traditional concerns of political analysis and to existing studies of the 2010 election. Influenced by what might be termed the ‘cultural turn’ in the study of mediated politics, we offer an interpretative examination of British ‘political culture’ (Almond and Verba 1963; Corner and Pels 2003), as constituted in the imaginative and seemingly more playful dimensions of media discourse, to set alongside those studies more concerned with (measurable) political bias, or impact on electoral outcomes. The larger AHRC-funded project ‘Media genre and political culture: Beyond the news’, from which this particular study has emerged, focuses on the ways in which mediated engagement with British political culture is expressed through varying treatments of political values, imagination, expression and performance, across a spectrum of media formats and genres. Gaining momentum over the past decade, political analysts and media scholars have contributed significant theoretical and empirical research into the ‘intermingling’ of politics and popular culture (Street 2000, 61; see also Corner and Pels 2003; Van Zoonen 2005), with particular interest paid to the incursion of celebrity logic into political life (e.g. Street 2004; Drake and Higgins 2006), and the perceived shifts towards a personalisation of politics (Corner 2000; Langer 2007 and 2010; Smith 2008). While the above authors might offer differing perspectives on the causes, consequences, uniformity or desirability of such noted shifts, this body of work recognises the valuable role of critical engagement with the more ‘colourful’ mediations of political activities and personas for enriching political analysis. It is within this wider cultural context, with particular reference to the campaign period and just beyond, that the ‘Nick Clegg’ persona and its imaginative appropriation was elaborated in media discourses.1

Why Clegg? There are many sound reasons to single out Nick Clegg for special attention when examining media coverage of the 2010 election. Clegg unarguably assumed the role of a key protagonist in the overarching narrative of the election. No third party leader has received such prominent (and, moreover, excitable) exposure during an election campaign in Britain since television became the dominant medium for election campaigning (e.g. see Seymour-Ure 1998, 132; Deacon et al. 2006, 230; Scammell and Beckett 2010, 297). An intensive media focus on all three party leaders was a particular feature of this election, consolidating evaluations of the importance of leader image for guiding voters’ decisions: their larger role tracked in recent electoral research (Clarke et al. 2009), and reinforced in the performative nature of the media coverage itself, in which the leaders’ centrality is only further ‘proved’ by the growing attention they garner as mediated personalities (Denver 2010, 22). Clegg had become leader of the Liberal Democrats in December 2007, replacing Menzies Campbell after the latter’s short year-and-a-half tenure. Although a respected political figure on foreign affairs, Campbell’s leadership was dogged by © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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criticisms regarding his age (in his mid-60s at the time) and lack of popularity in comparison to predecessor Charles Kennedy. Lib Dem leader from 1999 to 2006, Kennedy had been dubbed ‘chat show Charlie’ due to his avuncular, laid-back style and his willingness to appear on popular television formats (see Evans and Andersen 2005). Considering the general difficulties in securing media access and attention that British third party leaders face between election campaign periods, and Clegg’s rapid progression from newly elected MP in 2005 to party leader in 2007, his lack of a clearly recognisable public profile in early 2010 is not altogether surprising. Indeed, Vince Cable, Lib Dem deputy leader, had the higher public standing of the two men, beginning the election race at Nick Clegg’s side and initially ubiquitous in the campaign. Clegg’s ‘smooth operator’ ways and relaxed, presentable media persona had garnered some attention: notably in his interview for GQ magazine with Piers Morgan, where he claimed to have slept with ‘no more than 30’ women (Jones 2008), earning him the ‘Clegg-over’ moniker, but more positively in his campaign for Gurkhas’ rights to live in Britain and in his strong backing for parliamentary reform following the MPs’ expenses scandal. An episode of the topical comedy panel show, Have I Got News for You, broadcast on the very night of the first televised leaders’ debate (and recorded the day before) included several jokes premised on Clegg’s anonymity and the panellists’ own reluctance to spend time on the third party’s campaign. But their mockery would soon appear outdated. Clegg’s securing of equal billing in the debates ensured his participation in what became the centrepiece of the election campaign (Wring and Ward 2010, 802). It was from this initial exposure, enhanced by his confident performance, that so-called ‘Cleggmania’ developed.2 According to the many Twitter comments during the first debate, and the first instant polls, it was Clegg who emerged as the clear ‘winner’. Whether due to the novelty value, or his telegenic techniques of mediated address, the direct and instantaneous public response meant that experts, spin doctors and commentators could not credibly dispute that the visibility awarded to Clegg had done wonders for his public standing. At the launch of the Lib Dem manifesto on 14 April 2010, Clegg was asked to comment on Vince Cable’s popularity; by the next evening Clegg had shared a platform in a ‘prime ministerial’ debate in front of over 9 million viewers, and by the weekend had been declared the most popular politician since Winston Churchill, according to a Sunday Times poll (18 April). Personal popularity apparently translated into support for his party: over the next few days polls indicated an apparent 50 per cent increase in support in the space of four days (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010, 165). Inevitably, this new perception of Clegg as a serious challenger mobilised opponents into hostile action, with personal attacks and scrutiny of policies emanating particularly from the Conservative press office and Tory-supporting newspapers (Kavanagh and Cowley, 2010, 167). These developments undoubtedly necessitated rethinking by party strategists, and thereby transformed ‘the narrative of the campaign’ (Wring and Ward 2010, 221), though in terms of media ‘effects’ it is much more difficult to track decisively the extent to which the debates, Cleggmania and the subsequent backlash (along with other campaigning strategies) played their part in influencing voter behaviour. In the election ballot on 6 May 2010, the Lib Dems increased their share of the national vote by only 1 per © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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cent (to 23.6 per cent), and lost five parliamentary seats overall (from 62 to 57) (Denver 2010, 11). The ultimately, and surprisingly, rather stable result for the Lib Dems occurred within a wider political context characterised by instability and uncertainty; with no outright winner between the two main parties, Clegg’s initial disappointment at not winning more seats for his own party was superseded by a recognition that the weakness of the other two parties gave him a strong position to negotiate a role in a coalition government. As noted, this article complements the existing studies of campaigning strategies, political journalism and polling analysis by broadening its concerns to assess the nature of media representations of Clegg as a ‘new political phenomenon’ (Kavanagh and Cowley 2010, 178), and especially in the evocations of the Lib Dem leader through use of political metaphor. The sudden visibility granted to Clegg took many forms across the mediascape, with both professional media outlets and the online public employing an expressive range of critique and humour to comment and reflect on his prominence. Creative use of recording and editing technologies, now publicly available as never before, resulted in online comic montages, mocking Gordon Brown’s use of the phrase ‘I agree with Nick’ to build solidarity with the Lib Dems at the expense of the Conservatives. T-shirts with this slogan went on sale within days of the first TV debate, with websites apparently selling 10.4 million worldwide (Politics Show, 22 April). When the right-wing press attempted to counteract such enthusiasm, with headlines such as ‘Nick Clegg in Nazi slur on Britain’ (Daily Mail, 22 April 2010), users of the social media site Twitter reacted with ironic ripostes to the press backlash, appending the hashtag #nickcleggsfault to their messages in order to satirise pointedly the apparent personal smears.3 Immediately apparent in the condensed outline above is that the efforts to organise, understand, mock or scorn the phenomenon of Clegg’s sudden rise to prominence were reproduced and modified across a wide range of media contexts. To study a single media form, whether serious (such as press editorials) or comic (such as cartoons) would ignore the crucial inter-discursivity and interdependence of the various media constructions and interpretations of Clegg as a political actor, public celebrity and symbol. Instead, we offer an exploration of the Clegg phenomenon which draws from the full range of media formats and genres that were deployed in its development. Our study is offered not as an account of the politics of ‘Cleggmania’ (quantity of coverage; effects on opinion poll results), but on the trans-media metaphors and analogies used to characterise Clegg during and after the election campaign. Our account will thus form the basis of a reflection upon what the nature of such expressions and treatments reveal about broader issues of political culture and media genre, and will allow us to assess the significance of our analysis in this context.

Metaphor and Imagery in the World of Politics Metaphor and politics have a long history as complementary subjects for scholars across disciplines; indeed metaphors are arguably indispensable to political expression and political knowledge (Miller 1979; Mio 1997). Writing on metaphor and © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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modern politics has traditionally fallen into two broad strands: the study of metaphors adopted by politicians as persuasive and justificatory devices (as rhetoric); or the use of an overriding metaphor in the media to frame and simplify the complex activities of the political world (for example, as game, war, theatre (Hellsten and Renvall 1997; Mio 1997); or more specifically, football (Semino and Masci 1996) or soap opera (Van Zoonen 2005)). From the field of political communication, research on media framing treats the metaphor as a framing device (Pan and Kosicki 1993). Elena Semino characterises metaphor broadly as ‘the phenomenon whereby we talk and, potentially, think about something in terms of something else’ (Semino 2008, 1). Although, as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) recognised, some metaphors are deeply imbricated in everyday speech and thought, this is not at the expense of creative abilities to appropriate reality in fresh metaphorical terms. Twenty-first century mass media and social media are the conduits by which some metaphors are successfully drawn into more general usage, by extension and by repetition (Edelman 1964; Mio 1997; Kress 2010). The reproducibility and reworking of metaphors across media forms further reveals their integral role in constructing social and political reality rather than ‘embellish[ing] a preconstituted reality for rhetorical purposes’ (Van Teeffelen 1994, 384). As Toine Van Teeffelen argues, metaphors can have a strong impact due to ‘their “literary” quality and visual concreteness’: ‘Since they organize the understanding of cause and effect, symptom and essence, and especially praise and blame, metaphors can be employed to serve political aims or interests’ (Van Teeffelen, 1994, 384–385). The unexpected flurry of excitement produced by Nick Clegg’s rise in visibility during the already heightened fervour of an election campaign offers a unique opportunity to observe the uses of metaphor and other imagery in the moulding and remaking of a new political persona. Comparable academic studies are hard to find: leaders’ mediated images have received scholarly attention with reference to a single form such as cartoons (e.g. Plumb 2004), via newspaper coverage solely (Langer 2010) or the leader’s projected image in speeches and party broadcasts (Finlayson 2002; Finlayson and Martin 2008), and by engaging with political metaphor (Semino and Masci 1996), but while Angela Smith (2008) draws on a range of media sources in her study on Gordon Brown as a ‘celebrity father’, the cross-media, cross-genre and metaphor-focused nature of the present study offers a fresh approach to exploring how recurring tropes applied in leader imagery offer revealing insights into wider political culture. Following a loosely chronological structure based on the campaign period and week of coalition talks following the electoral ballot, the next section presents examples and analysis of various mediated attempts to ascribe to Nick Clegg selective characteristics and values through the use of labelling, metaphor and literary/popular culture allusions, across a variety of communicative forms. Particularly apparent is the use of affective and emotion-laden language, references to Clegg’s physicality, and the unusual political metaphor, not of war or sport, but of romance and marriage. © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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Before and After Clegg the Invisible If the reality of a political persona exists in its various modes of mediated construction, then, at the start of the campaign, Nick Clegg barely existed at all. Clegg’s status as a relatively unknown political leader is significant; studies show that voters (especially non-partisans) are more likely to make judgements based on media images and physical appearance when candidates are less well known (Johns and Shephard 2007). Although the aforementioned research is based on responses to photographs of MPs, the role of media-initiated imagery (including caricature, stereotyping, use of verbal and visual metaphors) also deserves attention as a possible influencing factor when assessing perceived personality traits and values of politicians. In this case, journalists and commentators had largely ignored Clegg thus far, and so for them, he did not really exist. When the launch of an election campaign started to attract media attention, the journalists’ own non-attention was reflected back. Quentin Letts referred to Clegg as ‘a strangely insubstantial creation. He is an air sandwich. The hole in the doughnut’ (Letts 2010a). On similar lines, he was characterised both verbally and pictorially as a soufflé, a bubble, a balloon and ‘political froth’. Although the insubstantiality of Clegg’s persona continued to be a theme reworked both linguistically and visually throughout the media campaign, once his role as a substantial ‘real’ political actor could no longer be credibly ignored, media commentators focused on his physicality, at times crudely casting him in both female and male guises. First, we discuss how the initial metaphors and other semiotic resources worked to diminish and undermine Clegg, before turning to the later portrayals, in which a range of explicitly gendered roles ascribed to Clegg betrayed standards of prurience and underlying sexism in many sections of the commentary.

Clegg the Popular Clegg’s name was the crucial ingredient in a number of prominent neologisms, often used to comment on the phenomenon of his perceived popularity, for example Cleggwagon, Cleggmania, Cleggphoria, Cleggacy, Cleggolatry. While placing Clegg as a central phenomenon of the campaign, such expressions simultaneously trivialised his standing as a political figure, through association with suffixes such as ‘[band]wagon’, ‘mania’ and ‘phoria’. Diminutive forms of his name (Clegglet, Cleggie, the Cleggster), while they too diminished his standing as a politician, in their lack of deference and their emphasis on his youthfulness, did so in terms that also code the affection of a more personal relationship, along with other ironic modes of address such as Captain Clegg. Comparable creative efforts were not applied to the other two main party leaders with anything approaching the same level of intensity. In casting his popularity in hysterical terms, this apparent flattery linked the nature of his support to unsubstantiated and irrational feelings, rather than measured judgement. By exaggerating his popularity, the media could then use such comparisons to ridicule both Clegg and his supporters. For instance, by comparing Clegg © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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to Jesus, whether in comical or serious tones, in the following examples he is both trivialised as a ‘pretty boy’ and censured for his assumed piety. In visual form, cartoonist Adams depicted Clegg as walking on water (Daily Telegraph, 20 April 2010); while during a Question Time panel show, journalist Anne Leslie referred to Clegg’s Jesus-like status via an adapted quotation from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979), declaring that Clegg is ‘not the Messiah, he’s just a very pretty boy’ (22 April 2010). In the same programme William Hague referred to Clegg’s ‘holierthan-thou’ image, keen to disrupt public perceptions of ‘honesty’ (for which Clegg polled highly) and to align his qualities with the more unattractive trait of piety. Two days later, columnist Charles Moore revealed his exasperation, along with his awareness of others’ resistance towards the hostile right-wing press, by both sarcastically challenging this equivalence while also extending the metaphor, albeit in terms privileging a traditional Christian readership: ‘Clegg, I can exclusively reveal, is not the Messiah, but voters are not much impressed when told this by the Pharisees and Sadducees’ (Moore 2010). Bewilderment at Clegg’s popularity in the days following the first televised debate led to many comparisons: he was the Susan Boyle of politics, due to his surprise performance in a TV ‘talent’ show; he offered Obama-like promises of hope and change (‘I wonder if Mr Obama knows that he, Barack, is the Nick Clegg of American politics’ (Letts 2010b)); in fictional terms he was James Bond (‘abseiling into the headquarters of Goldman Sachs’ (Gimson 2010a)). A useful visual exemplar of this trend was the portrayal of Clegg as Pinocchio by cartoonist Martin Rowson in The Guardian (occurring in seven editorial cartoons during our sample period). While this fictional character is a popular parallel figure for cartoonists’ depiction of politicians, it is usually employed to caricature the politician as a liar, with Pinocchio’s nose famously growing as he tells more lies (e.g. Richard Nixon (Mio 1997, 120); George W. Bush (Conners 2005, 485)). In contrast to previous examples, Rowson fruitfully explored the alignments between Clegg and Pinocchio through the latter’s desire to be a ‘real’ boy, playing with the theme of Clegg as not quite a ‘real’ politician, an innocent who has found himself in the murky world of politics. This takes into consideration both Clegg’s own tendency to project himself as the representative of a ‘new politics’ of ‘honesty’ in which adversarialism for its own sake is abandoned, and the mainstream media’s conception of Clegg as not wholly tangible thus far as a ‘real’ political actor. The allusions to the children’s story also emphasise the journey that a young Clegg/Pinocchio has undertaken, with the characters often pictured in action, walking towards the next challenge in his voyage of discovery; at times being led astray by Cameron and Brown in various roles. Similarly, in a single Andrew Gimson sketch, Clegg is cast as two other literary figures, pertinently once again from children’s books; he is both the Elephant’s Child in Rudyard Kipling’s story, ‘in danger of being eaten alive’, and ‘reminiscent of the Molesworth character Fotherington-Thomas, the boy in Down with Skool who goes round saying “Hello clouds, hello sky” ’ (Gimson 2010b). Such portrayals undermined Clegg on multiple levels; read in a straightforward manner, he was an inexperienced boy in a man’s world (and it was a male-dominated election); read alternatively, with a sceptical take on his supposed guilelessness, this was a cunning © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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ruse to mask his political capabilities. The second reading, proffered at times in the right-wing press, posed Clegg as a double danger, both destabilising the probability of a Conservative majority after the election and, furthermore, bringing ‘uncertainty’ to the political process itself. Although the next section will deal more specifically with the various gendered roles assigned to Clegg, this labelling of Clegg as a ‘boy’ also speaks to the particularly masculinised world of politics (Wahl-Jorgensen 2000). The Daily Mirror frontpage headline on the day after the first debate stated: ‘It’s a man vs. boys: Brown crushes naïve Cameron as kid Clegg shines’ (Daily Mirror, 16 April 2010). While this alignment of Cameron and Clegg against Brown allows ‘kid Clegg’ to ‘shine’, it is Brown’s manliness that is the ultimate accolade. In a comment piece within the same issue, Tony Parsons wrote of the pre-debate tension: ‘Nick Clegg, guzzling water, looked as though a big boy had just stolen his dinner money and was ready to burst into tears’ (Parsons 2010a). The following day, Parsons extended his metaphor: ‘on the second debate, he will find that the big boys will come looking for him as he skips merrily across the playground, his dinner money jingle-jangling in his grey flannel shorts’ (Parsons 2010b). One might expect to find such playful subjectivities in the political sketch writing and cartoons of newspapers, but press formats associated with more seriousminded commentary also fitfully adopted this imagery. The playground scenario was evident in the broadsheet leader editorials: in one example, the Telegraph both scorned Clegg’s apparent positioning as a ‘Westminster outsider’ and warned the Liberal Democrats that ‘they are now up with the big boys’ and so should expect ‘rigorous analysis’ (Daily Telegraph, 19 April 2010). Although disparaging Clegg’s claim to be an ‘outsider’, by simultaneously telling him that he is ‘now up with the big boys’, the editorial implies that he has now entered a particular clique, on a higher level to the political space previously occupied. As Lib Dem party leader, Clegg may well have been a Westminster insider all along (as a youngster he attended the prestigious Westminster School), but now he has the audacity to be a popular and visible Westminster insider, and so deserving the attention of the selfappointed press bullies, to extend the metaphor. Explicitly in the two examples, the ‘big boys’ are Cameron and Brown; implicitly, the ‘bullying’ is already present in the editorial discourse, with various hierarchical representations and imagery employed to assert a commanding and pugilistic tone. Preoccupations with insider and outsider status abound in political life. Here, it is possibly the predominance of ex-public schoolboys within the elite spheres of politics and journalism that accounts for the fixation with Clegg as a ‘boy’ to be initiated into the top echelons of the political sphere (Elliot Major 2006). While ostensibly stripping away the layers of Clegg’s pretence and performance by pointing out his privileged upbringing, a number of reporters used their own experiences at the same private school to authenticate these stories (most famously documentarymaker Louis Theroux revealing that he was Clegg’s ‘fag’4 but other examples also emerged). Such authentication might work to superimpose one myth of Clegg’s personal character over another, but it also grounds Clegg within an elite sphere occupied by the journalists themselves, and so might paradoxically reassure conservative-minded readers that Clegg holds the credentials to operate within the political establishment. © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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The Gendering of Clegg The language of love, sex and marriage does not appear to receive wide attention as a source domain for political metaphors, in comparison to war, games and theatre, for example. Other than the familiar expression of a ‘political honeymoon’, to describe the brief period of popularity when a leader is first elected, few expressions spring to mind. Scholars have written widely on the expectation for leaders to ‘embody the party brand’ (Langer 2010, 61), and to possess the ability to communicate as likeable human beings, rather than distant statesmen or women, employing appropriate repertoires flexibly adapted to suit multiple media formats and types of public engagement (Corner 2000; Van Zoonen 2005). This expectation places the individual qualities of leaders at the forefront of political communication concerns, where inadequacies of performance and political style can be cruelly exposed with a single lapse. As discussed earlier, the unexpected popularity of Clegg, witnessed at the very least in the daily opinion polling and participatory media activity, caused an excitable agitation among commentators, in terms of anxiety and also of titillation. Just as the boyishness and illusory qualities of Clegg were employed to define and diminish him, once speculation mounted around the possibility of a hung parliament and future coalition government, Clegg was recast as seducer and seduced, including in female form. Possibly prompted by general observations that Clegg was relatively young, ‘fresh-faced’ and traditionally handsome, in an agreeable rather than striking sense, the media conveyed some suspicion of his ‘good-looking’ appeal: ‘Clegg’s siren call is dangerously seductive ... So, this evening, keep an eye on that smooth, good-looking guy on the left. He’s very persuasive’ (Brogan 2010). As Clegg’s ‘seductive’ charm appeared to ‘work its magic’ with the public, a number of commentators questioned both his intentions and the fickle nature of the public’s approval: Like so many Shirley Valentines, bored by staid, unchanging, grumpy normality and bowled over by a sudden exposure to youth, sunshine and charm, the voters of Britain are conducting a holiday romance with Nick Clegg (editorial, Mail on Sunday, 18 April 2010). Cleggphoria was a swoon, a holiday romance, a moment of madness by the voters that would soon pass when they came back to their senses and fell back into the arms of the big, old boys (Andrew Rawnsley, The Observer, 25 April 2010). This second example manages to contain at least three of the discursive features discussed so far: ‘Cleggphoria’, ‘holiday romance’ and ‘big, old boys’. The aligning of Clegg with a holiday romance is not only dismissive of his popularity; it also introduces an element of narrative, a dramatisation of the election via an unconventional source domain. The theme of holiday romance reappeared on political discussion shows across TV and radio (e.g. The Daily Politics on 22 April and 5 May 2010). A number of commentators appeared affronted over what they detected as a superficial liking for Clegg’s personality rather than his policies, fully embracing © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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the paternalistic stance in their figurative language. For example, there was the following exchange in the final edition of The Daily Politics before the election (on 5 May 2010), between political interviewer Andrew Neil and Liberal Democrat spokesman Simon Hughes: Andrew Neil: Maybe, the problem you’re facing now, is that people rather liked the cut of Mr Clegg, he was a new kid on the block, he came over well, seems nice, older people would think that if their daughters brought that man home for dinner he would be ... (emphasis added). Simon Hughes: Oh, you are so predictable [laughter]. Andrew Neil: That’s the general attitude, but when they looked at your policies ... In another studio discussion segment later in the same programme, when asked whether the leader debates have engaged voters, writer and actor Julian Fellowes replied: ‘you know, Nick Clegg, he looks like a nice chap, I’m sure he’s charming, but we’re not electing these people to come to dinner, we’re electing them to govern the country’ (emphasis added). Reworking the theme of ‘coming to dinner’ in this later discussion, Fellowes remarked that, where people might have wanted ‘great kings’ or ‘noblemen’ to govern them in different periods of history (with no mention of female rulers), now they want ‘great friends’, or someone who could be ‘their pals’. Tellingly, he later attempted to flatter the female presenter, saying she would be too young to remember the 1997 election. In conjunction with his mode of patronising chauvinism, Fellowes firmly placed the supporting of Clegg as contrary to what ‘serious’ people would do. Fellowes, and Neil before him, also alluded to the shifting boundaries between acceptable private and public realms when it comes to assessing the positive and negative attributes of political leaders (Corner 2000). Both identified a triviality attached to Clegg’s appeal, cogently expressed through referring to Clegg as someone whom people would like ‘to come to dinner’: the ‘problem’ they identify is simultaneously one for the Liberal Democrats, having a popular leader but bad policies, and a problem for political culture, that the electorate might engage with trivial, affective sensibilities in making voting choices, rather than a deliberative understanding of party policies and their consequences. Over the course of the campaign, then, Clegg appeared to progress figuratively from one type of intimacy (holiday romance) to the more socially acceptable ‘invitation to dinner’, with its connotations of a different kind of intimacy in the middle-class domestic sphere. The election result and the following phase of coalition talks, which saw Clegg negotiating alternately with both Cameron and Brown, would disrupt these cosy familial allusions. When a weekend of coalition talks failed to produce a formal agreement, political commentators turned hostile towards Clegg and his team of negotiators. Although particularly in evidence in the right-wing press, the shift to characterising Clegg (and the Lib Dem leadership) as ‘tart’ or ‘harlot’ also stemmed from senior politicians, such as Labour MP David Blunkett (‘Can you trust the Liberal Democrats? They are behaving like every harlot in history’), and unnamed Conservatives: ‘Earlier one Tory branded the Lib Dems “a bunch of tarts” ’ (The Sun, 11 May 2010).5 © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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The Daily Mail declared Clegg to be ‘the Madame Fifi of politics’ on more than one occasion, ‘fluttering his eyelashes at one suitor before sneaking off in secret to play footsie with another’ (12 May 2010), while in an article robustly entitled ‘Clegg’s Lib Dems are a bunch of two-faced shysters’, The Sun’s Trevor Kavanagh wrote: ‘The Lib Dems are little better than a gaggle of political tarts wandering Westminster in search of a John’ (The Sun, 11 May 2010). The following extract from Quentin Letts captures the prevalent tone, including its caricatured ventriloquising of the exotic whore: What a tarts’ bazaar! As another day of secretive meetings drew to a close last night, as the come hithers and Westminster winks and nods and plain political indecency faded with the May evening’s light, it was hard not to feel soiled by what we used to call our democracy. ... Mr Laws said that there was no deal yet with the Tories and that the Libs were now going to talk to Labour. Well, hello, boys. How much you pay preeeety girl for good time? (Letts 2010c) Even following the coalition deal between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats later that day, the political actions of Nick Clegg were linked to sexual impropriety: Nick Clegg has climbed into bed with the Tories, whom most of his supporters hate, for a political price that is more than a pittance, but scarcely worth the price of their souls. More than a few Tories, in their turn, are dismayed that David Cameron has made a deal with a party of hookers (Hastings 2010). Overwhelmingly in these selected examples, the disapproval of Clegg’s conduct during coalition negotiations is constructed through the language of moralistic judgement combined with prurience and underlying misogyny (in the sense that the chosen terms of abuse align their distaste with female promiscuity or sex work). The perceived offensiveness of Clegg’s actions is enacted through reference to the bodily domain; particularly that associated with a ‘sleazy’ or seedy side of life. Recurrent phrases such as ‘act of betrayal’, ‘back-channel talks’, ‘squalid’, ‘sordid’, ‘duplicity’, ‘backstairs stitch-up’ and ‘treachery’ characterise the nature of the coalition talks by means of a highly emotionalised, melodramatic and moralistic tone. Such re-imagining of the political world through sexual metaphor was not confined to the right-wing press. Writer and comedian Andy Hamilton described the deal with the Conservatives as the ‘fastest personality change’ of a political party: ‘in under an hour, the Liberals went from political virgins to hanging around on the street corner with their knickers round their ankles’ (News Quiz, 14 May 2010). There is a notable shift here, among a number of commentators at least, to broaden the characterisation of ‘tarts’ to the party more generally rather than to Clegg directly. It is possible that the choice of unsavoury and aggressive language is counteracted by a distancing move, away from naming individuals. While many commentators appeared captivated with the sexual innuendo, a Guardian editorial provided a rare corrective: ‘Mr Clegg gave Labour its chance, too—not “squalidly” (Daily Mail); not “a coup” (Daily Telegraph), but properly, openly and constitutionally’ (Guardian editorial, 12 May 2010). Amid all the excitement and perceived irregularities, The Guardian felt the need to counter pointedly the lurid choice of © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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words adopted in other newspapers, and stress that the coalition talks were perfectly proper and legitimate political behaviour. Even before the election result or formation of coalition government, Evening Standard blogger Paul Waugh had posted a picture, morphing Clegg and Cameron into the Arnolfini Wedding couple in the painting by Van Eyck (inspired by the name of the venue for the second leaders’ debate, the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol). Tellingly, Clegg appears as the wife rather than the husband (‘The Cam– Clegg Marriage’, 23 April 2010). The manipulated image anticipated the subsequent remoulding of Clegg as the coalition government was formed, as a minor partner to Cameron in a new political ‘marriage’. Although British politics had ‘marriages’ before (Blair–Brown for instance, see Naughtie 2002), the sexual innuendo was now unrestrained: ‘From the start, Cameron’s tactic was to smother Clegg in the warmest of embraces. ... His is no vague Common flirtation. It is the full consummation of marriage that is implied by coalition government’ (The Guardian, 12 May 2010). While feminised versions of Clegg persisted in a number of depictions, the romance storyline now shifted to a ‘bromance’ or gay partnership, bolstered by a joint press conference held in the Downing Street Rose Garden in which Cameron and Clegg provided the perfect images of informal jocularity more associated with wedding speeches than government formation. Harnessing the creative attributes of the audiovisual medium, television programme makers had great fun in editing the footage for humorous effect, overlaying heart-shaped graphics and jaunty music. The Daily Politics juxtaposed footage of the two men sparring during the leader debates, with the accompanying music, ‘When two tribes go to war ...’, abruptly replaced with the Rose Garden images and the song lyrics, ‘You’re just too good to be true, I can’t take my eyes off you’ (13 May 2010). In one edition, This Week used both Frank Sinatra’s ‘Love and Marriage’ and Rolf Harris’ ‘Two Little Boys’ to accompany the familiar images (13 May 2010). Despite the widespread circulation and re-presentation of the images in humorous form, the tone could be generally characterised as gently mocking rather than crudely hostile. A pervading, cautious optimism tempered the language and visual imagery, especially of those on the right; pleased to see Cameron as prime minister, and grumblingly accepting of the coalition situation. The agitation and stridency prevalent in the earlier characterisations of Clegg now became unsustainable for political and pragmatic reasons, both for politicians and media actors. The peculiarity of the election campaign and later stylisation as a ‘romance’ led some commentators to remark openly on the generic properties of this spectacle. Asked to recall the one image that ‘sticks out’ from the campaign, journalist Miranda Green replied: I mean the Rose Garden, obviously, is the obvious one; the buddy movie, the love story, the romcom, whatever you want to call it. Everyone’s been talking about movie metaphors all week, haven’t they? I think actually the real difficulty has been to work out what genre is this movie. Is it a romance, is it a buddy movie, will it end in tragedy? At one point at the beginning of the week, though, let’s not forget, it was a bit too much like a screwball comedy with everybody rushing around like a Whitehall farce (Politics Show, 16 May 2010). © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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It is not merely politics as ‘soap opera’ that is being played out here; the election media coverage managed to sweep across metaphorical and generic boundaries in its near-hysterical efforts to define and explain the emerging political realities. Green comments on the dramatised style of politics as if, once we understand the generic conventions, maybe then we can understand the new political reality. In the end, Clegg did not break the left–right duopoly in British politics, at least not through party gains in seats, as some had expected. The Conservatives’ failure to secure a majority of MPs in the Commons did, however, lead to a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. As Clegg’s foray into ‘big boys’ politics at the heart of government continues, his life as (a now rather broken) Pinocchio is ongoing in Martin Rowson’s cartoons, while others have cast him variously as Cameron’s butler, fag, wife or dog. Exactly two months after the election, cartoonist Steve Bell adapted John Everett Millais’ famous painting of a boy blowing bubbles, drawing Clegg as the boy, alone in the Commons staring at his single bubble (The Guardian, 6 July 2010). For a later feature in The Observer; in which four cartoonists reflect on their pictorial re-imaginings of Clegg, Bell explained that it is Clegg’s lack of identity that makes it ‘hard to get a handle on him’: ‘Politicians have to define themselves first before you can define them. As a cartoonist, though, you’re doing it simultaneously, so you do help the process along a bit’ (cited in Preston 2010). In this co-production of political identities, the presentation of political self is matched, transformed and remoulded by the pen of an astute writer or cartoonist.

Conclusions As we indicated at the outset, our primary research interest is in the broad contours of the national political mediascape, at a moment of heightened public interest in politics and with some distinctive features in respect of both the politics (no clear election result) and the mediation (the leaders’ debates). It was not our intention to posit causal links between media treatment and voting outcomes, since trends and patterns on this cultural plane are somewhat resistant to the kind of quantification that such an assessment would seem to require. Instead, we have followed an approach that has allowed us to get a semiotic fix, using Clegg as our central focus, on the historical distinctiveness of the 2010 general election. In surveying the broad mediascape throughout that period, our study offers a more nuanced picture of the meanings and values in public circulation than a study focused on one specific genre would be able to do. In addition, our focus on metaphor and other forms of textual creativity is a valuable source of insights into the underlying thematics of political mediation at this transitional moment in British politics. We regard these insights as being of significance in their own right, and as supporting previous research in the same general area. The material we have examined undoubtedly offers further evidence of ‘personalisation’ in British politics. This refers to the shift of emphasis on to the voice, body, personality and private life of the individual politician, especially that of the leader, and away from the policies and ideological differences between parties. Following on from the televised debates, Clegg was remarkably prominent (remarkably for a Lib Dem leader) in the campaign, while the commentary he attracted was relatively unconstrained by his prior public reputation. © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)


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As the election progressed, imaginations got to work by mixing old and new ideas to configure Nick Clegg as a significant presence in the political sphere, and respond to what appeared to be the rise in his personal popularity. Clegg would have attracted some attention whatever he did or said, as previous third party leaders have done. David Steel, David Owen and Charles Kennedy are three such former leaders who have been mediated as very particular ‘characters’ to the British public. It was the uncertain, indeterminate conditions of this election that intensified the attention, and presented commentators with new opportunities. The ways in which they exploited those opportunities variously reflect their roles as humorists and entertainers and/or as political critics, speaking to, and speaking for, different parts of the national public. This is the terrain where political culture is established. At one level, the romantically and sexually themed metaphors to which so many observers were drawn when David Cameron and Nick Clegg undertook to negotiate a coalition government represented an innovatory idiom for new times, in place of the clichéd deployment of metaphors drawn from war and sporting contests. At another level, however, this re-imagining of political activities through the idiom of romance was often underscored with more familiar patterns of sexism, homophobia and misogyny.

About the Authors Katy Parry, Department of Communication and Media, Roxby Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK, email: [email protected] Kay Richardson, Department of Communication and Media, Roxby Building, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 7ZT, UK, email: [email protected]

Notes This work was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant no. AH/H000933/1) and we are very grateful for this support. 1. The election audit covered a five-week period, from 15 April to 19 May 2010. We included in the sample, from newspapers: the front page headline, political sketch, cartoons, main political columnist and editorials of The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Guardian and Daily Telegraph, along with their Sunday equivalents. From television: The Daily Politics, The Wright Stuff, Panorama, Question Time, This Week, Have I Got News for You, Andrew Marr Show and Politics Show. From radio: Nicky Campbell’s Phone-In, The Media Show, The News Quiz, Any Questions, Any Answers and The Heckler/Week in Westminster. We also collected material from four political blogs, representing party activists and media: Dizzy Thinks, Luke Akehurst, Paul Waugh (Evening Standard) and Liberal Burblings. All items were collated and coded in an Access database. 2. There is no previous sample of similar material across the non-news mediascape with which to compare coverage of Nick Clegg to other third party leaders in past elections. However we can compare data with our own similar audit in February 2010. In February, Clegg appeared as a subject or participant in only 3.3 per cent of all media items (compared to 31.0 per cent for Brown and 23.2 per cent for Cameron). In contrast, for the April–May audit, Clegg appeared in 52.7 per cent of items (compared to 48.6 per cent for Brown and 54.0 per cent for Cameron). The all-round lower figures reflect the non-election focus of the earlier period (although a ‘phoney campaign’ was noticeably already under way), but the rise in visibility for Clegg is undeniably significant. 3. The BBC’s technology correspondent for the election, Rory Cellan-Jones, noted that by lunchtime on 22 April ‘#nickcleggsfault’ was the third biggest trending topic on Twitter around the world; http:// www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/04/its_all_nick_cleggs_fault.html. 4. A ‘fag’ is a younger boy who acts as a kind of unpaid servant to an older pupil at British public school. 5. It is possible that Blunkett was referencing Stanley Baldwin’s 1931 attack on press barons: ‘power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’ (see Curran and Seaton 2010, 37), and even meant to employ the term in its archaic sense, to refer to a man rather than a woman, but the subsequent examples show that this was not the common meaning that circulated in the media. © 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)

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© 2011 The Authors. British Journal of Politics and International Relations © 2011 Political Studies Association BJPIR, 2011, 13(4)