A RT I C L E ‘Getting behind the image’: personality politics in a Labour party election broadcast Michael Pearce, University of Leeds, UK

Abstract The article examines a Labour party broadcast from the 1997 UK general election. I show how the film uses the conventions of a particular mode of contemporary documentary to present a portrait of Tony Blair. My main focus is on the way Blair’s ‘biography’ is used for propaganda purposes, and how the tensions between the competing requirements of biography and propaganda manifest themselves textually. In particular, I examine Blair’s strategic use of lifeworld discourses, and the role of pronominal choice in ‘self’ and ‘other’ referencing. Keywords: Blair, Tony; critical discourse analysis; Labour party; lifeworld discourses; party election broadcasts; political propaganda; pronouns

1 Introduction In the UK there is no established tradition of political parties using their leaders’ biographies in election campaigns. This contrasts with the USA, where accounts of the personal lives of presidential candidates first appeared in print in the early 19th century (for a historical survey see Morreale, 1993). There are several reasons for this. Differences in the political systems of the two countries mean that more interest has traditionally been taken in a candidate’s ‘personal’ qualities in the USA – where the President is head of state as well as a political leader – than in the UK, where the Prime Minister is the internally chosen head of the majority parliamentary party. Also, cultural aspects to do with notions of privacy and levels of formality have perhaps made it feel less ‘natural’ for politicians in the UK to use biography as a campaign tool. This is exemplified in the contrast between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. They were often regarded as having much in common ideologically, but their views on the ‘biopic’ were very different. Reagan’s campaign films of 1980 and 1984 exploited his biography (Morreale, 1993: 129–44), but Thatcher vetoed the transmission of a biographical party election broadcast (PEB) which the advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi had produced for the 1983 election. Tim Bell, who ran the Conservative account at Saatchis, claimed that Thatcher was embarrassed by the film’s treatment of her early years (Rosenbaum, 1997: 71). Nevertheless, there have been some notable examples of film biographies in recent UK political history.1 I will be dealing with a Labour party broadcast from the 1997 election made by Molly Dineen, which focuses exclusively on the character and personality of Tony Blair.2

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I adopt the analytical framework outlined in Fairclough’s recent work on the communicative style of Tony Blair. A distinctive feature of this style is Blair’s tendency to move back and forth within a short stretch of discourse between the public language of politics and ‘the vernacular language of the normal person’ (Fairclough, 2000: 8). In an analysis of a party conference speech and a television interview, Fairclough considers the ways in which accent, gesture, facial expression, discourse markers, pronouns and ‘on-line’ production features such as hesitation and repetition convey a sense of Blair the ‘normal person’ (2000: 95–118). Such switches are not without their political motivations, and Fairclough shows how Blair’s style has been engineered to convey values and outlooks generally associated with the ‘middle class’ and ‘middle-England’ (2000: 8). In this respect, it reflects what became one of ‘New’ Labour’s core beliefs after the election defeat of 1992: that the party could be made electable only by appealing to middle-class voters, even if that meant alienating its traditional supporters. My article supplements Fairclough’s work by offering a close analysis of Blair’s communicative style in a key text in New Labour’s history. I consider the Dineen PEB as an example of a complex, hybrid media genre; explore the propaganda function of the way Blair’s social and cultural background is presented; and examine the ways in which the politically sensitive notion of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is constructed and functions, particularly through Blair’s pronominal choices.

2 Modes of documentary Party political broadcasts (PPBs) often resemble other media genres. Since PPBs first appeared on television in 1951, the British audience has seen ones which, for example, ‘look like’ (either as a whole or in parts) advertisements, news bulletins, current affairs programmes, quiz shows and comedy sketches. The Blair film ‘looks like’ a documentary. ‘Documentary’ has been defined as a non-fiction film which is a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ (Plantinga, 1997: 27). This definition is broad enough to encompass a variety of discursive elements and styles, including ‘dramatised documentary, reporter-led current affairs, observational filmmaking’ and ‘interview-based programmes’ (Holland, 1997: 150). These are not ‘strictly-defined categories with clear boundaries’; non-fiction films often mix modes (Plantinga, 1997: 101), and the Blair film is a blend of interview and observational film-making, which also employs stock footage in the same way as a current affairs programme. In particular, it seems to be drawing on the representational resources of a genre which has become popular recently – the ‘celebrity’ documentary, in which famous public figures are filmed going about what is presented to the audience as their everyday business.3 Although celebrities often have a great deal of control over what appears in the final version of the documentary – indeed, most of these films are simply promotional vehicles for the celebrity-subject – viewers perhaps feel that they are being allowed privileged

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access to the ‘real lives’ of famous people. The Blair film seeks to exploit the audience’s sense of intimacy with its subject for political purposes. In particular, it does this by assuming that viewers’ experiences of other examples of the genre might lead them to expect a degree of candidness and honesty from the film, therefore making them less inclined to be suspicious of the broadcast’s political motives. This suspicion is one of the greatest barriers that political propaganda has to overcome.

3 Personality politics Clearly, the motivation for this biographical portrait is not simply to entertain or inform. In our times we perhaps do not readily associate biography with persuasive intent, but at various points in the history of the genre propagandists have turned to biography. For example, in the Middle Ages saints were glorified and secular rulers celebrated, and in the Victorian era biographies were often designed to inculcate piety in their readers. But contemporary biography is less at ease with such an approach and is generally more interested in presenting an ‘intimate’ and ‘truthful’ portrait of its subject. The tension between contemporary biographical practices and the requirement of propaganda to persuade is evident throughout the broadcast. Every facet of Blair’s personality and every detail of his background must be turned to political advantage. In this section I explore how the sense of intimacy evoked in the film is used for political ends, and then look at the way some of Blair’s political convictions are presented as deriving from his personal history and experiences.

3.1 The real Tony Blair Early in the broadcast (see Appendix for full transcript) we see Blair at the ‘opening ceremony’ of an election poster. The poster is a huge portrait of Blair. He is autographing it and posing for a group of press photographers. In voiceover, Blair states that ‘there is a part of you that constantly wonders whether it is worth staying in politics because of all the the rubbish that you have to do. I mean you you just have to do it’ (ll. 8–11).4 His claim to ‘ordinariness’ is to address the concern that much of contemporary politics is dominated by the media’s demand for images – that style often seems more significant than content. ‘Rubbish’ echoes the cry of the ‘ordinary’ voter faced with such displays; ‘you just have to do it’ is the complaint of people caught up in events beyond their control. It is a compelling strategy, but it obscures the fact that Blair and the party strategists who work with him are themselves largely responsible for the publicity-seeking events – such as signing giant posters – which he describes as ‘rubbish’. The film interweaves interview footage and scenes of Blair signing a poster, playing football with children, talking to children in school, making speeches,

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playing tennis, listening to a woman complain about the health service, visiting a hospital with his wife and getting on a plane. The ‘interviews’ take place in two cars, a train and Blair’s kitchen. I am using the term ‘interview’ because this is the media genre which these parts of the film most closely resemble, although the interviewer never appears. Indeed, most of the time we infer the presence of an interviewer because Blair’s gaze and physical orientation reveal that he is directing his comments to someone within the ‘frame’ of the film, rather than directly to the viewing audience. Consequently, the audience is positioned as ‘over-hearer’ and over-seer’, which contributes to the sense of intimacy. One of the ways in which Blair presents himself as ‘ordinary’ is by drawing on ‘lifeworld’ discourses. These are ‘discourses of ordinary life and ordinary experience’ as opposed to ‘official’ discourses which are discourses of public life (Fairclough, 1995: 164). The film begins with Blair stating that: if you’d said to me at sort of eighteen nineteen you’re gonna be a politician I’d’ve said forget it, anything else anything but being a politician . . . I thought politicians were complete pains in the backside. (ll. 1–7) The informality of the language, especially the elision (going to is always realised as gonna, I’d’ve) and colloquialism (‘forget it’; ‘pains in the backside’) together with the expression of cynicism towards politicians, locate this firmly as a lifeworld discourse. It makes a solidarity claim by expressing what is generally regarded as a widely held view, in language which ‘accommodates’ towards the speech of many audience members. It also generates audience interest, in that it provokes the response, ‘Well, you’re a politician now, so aren’t you a pain in the backside?’ The rest of the film is designed to supply the (negative) answer to this question by revealing hitherto concealed aspects of Blair’s character: ‘what I keep saying to people is get behind the image. It’s quite difficult to bring people to actually see the type of person you are’ (ll. 16–18). How is Blair presented in the film? His ‘ordinariness’ is signalled in a variety of ways. Intimacy is important. We first meet him in the back of a car at night as he talks about his youth. This is followed by a sequence illustrating the public Blair and then, after he has reminisced about his childhood footballing dreams in the back of the car, we find ourselves in his kitchen. He is dressed casually: we see him make tea and chat with his children. The domestic setting is strategically significant. The unremarkable middle-class kitchen reinforces the notion that Blair is an ordinary family man. He recounts how his father’s ambitions to become a Conservative MP were thwarted by illness. This generates sympathy, and it also allows him to make the key political point that his father has ‘come over to the Labour party now so it’s all fine’ (ll. 33–4). The persuasive strategy here is to move from the personal to the political in as unobtrusive a fashion as possible. It seems ‘natural’ now for Blair to give a concise, sloganeering definition of new Labour policy: ‘a different type of politics which is rooted in strong values and convictions but it’s not quite left and right in the way that it’s been before’ (11. 35–8). This is followed by an explanation of why people like his father ‘felt the Tory party was

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the party that was for them (ll. 47–8). Perhaps Blair is appealing to people who have always voted Conservative to switch their allegiance. Another move from lifeworld to public discourse begins with a sequence in which Blair is talking to his children: ‘homework? Well you’re gonna have a lot of that under Labour. You wait you wait till David Blunkett gets hold of you. You’ll be doing a lot of homework ha ha ha’ (ll. 66–9). Here the complexities of educational policy making are reduced to the fact that Blair’s children will be doing more homework ‘under Labour’ (at the time of the broadcast, David Blunkett was Shadow Minister of Education). The inclusion of children reinforces his image as a family man, and his interaction with them seems designed to show his ‘naturalness’. The sequence also foregrounds a Labour policy (more homework) which is possibly calculated to appeal to middle-class voters. And, once again, the personal provides a smooth transition to the more ‘political’ rehearsal of Labour’s education and welfare policy in the next section (see 3.2). A further ‘personalizing’ of the political occurs towards the end, where Blair returns to the subject of his father’s illness. In the preceding scene Blair visits a hospital ward and in voice-over claims that the ‘Conservatives don’t understand why we created the health service . . . the health service to me is a living breathing symbol of what a decent civilized society should mean in practice’ (ll. 153–7). We then return to the kitchen where Blair tells us how his father nearly died after a stroke and how his mother ‘nursed him for three years, taught him how to speak again’ (ll. 173–4). It seems reasonable to expect, after the discussion of the National Health Service, that the anecdote about his father might reveal his family’s debt to state welfare provision, but it does not. Blair actually emphasizes the role of the ordinary individual (in this case his mother) as health-care provider. Is he making a subtle point about individual responsibility (see 3.2)? The interviews in the car and train serve a different purpose from those in the kitchen. With the exception of the opening shot, they are less intimate. The settings emphasize Blair’s role as someone who works unceasingly, who is always on the move. For example, in lines 95–104 Blair talks about his specific achievements in ‘modernizing’ the Labour party, and how ‘we’ve got to do the same with the country’. On the train he considers the problems of unemployment, crime, drugs and the cost of welfare. In the final car sequence he deals with the dangers of political cynicism. There are no personal references here. Instead, we see the public, ‘official’ Blair, who is represented as competent and tough (yet understanding and caring). A further instance of Blair’s strategic use of lifeworld discourses is when he adopts the voices of others. This is a frequent occurrence in ordinary everyday conversation. The most sustained example of this is in lines 132–47: they say that there’s a great new Labour party that’s gonna change the world. But you know they’re just cynical. People are cynical about politics and politicians because they’ve had a government for at least for the past few years that have kept promising things never delivered them that has havered on one

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thing and another thing and people have almost got to the point where they say well what’s the use you’re all the same you know nothing’s ever gonna make any difference. And of course the Tories in a sense delight in that because then people say well we may as well [inaudible] just to stick with what we’ve got. But you don’t have to stick with what you’ve got. It’s absurd to say that we cannot be better than this. Here Blair reproduces a lifeworld discourse of political cynicism in which he speaks with the voice(s) of ordinary people (‘they say that there’s a great new Labour party . . . well what’s the use you’re all the same . . . we may as well [inaudible] just to stick with what we’ve got’). But it is interesting to note that Blair frames the voice of generalized cynicism within his own commentary (‘they’re just cynical. People are cynical about politics and politicians because they’ve had a government for at least . . . the past few years that have kept promising things never delivered them . . . people have almost got to the point . . . you don’t have to stick with what you’ve got’). This suggests that people’s cynicism is not actually with ‘politics and politicians’ in general, but with the Conservative government in particular. The ‘multivoicing’ here enables Blair to disguise a particular political judgement as commonsensical. 3.2 Personality and policy: education, health and unemployment The three main policy areas dealt with in the broadcast are education, health and unemployment. These areas of social life appear regularly in post-war political propaganda. They are important sites of struggle, where the different party ideologies are revealed most starkly. In this film they are discursively presented in various relationships to Blair’s ‘personality’. Education and health have a more or less ‘unproblematic’ relationship; but Blair’s relationship with unemployment is less straightforward. The film stresses the importance to Blair of education. The subject is introduced with a dramatic soundbite from a speech, designed to show the energy and commitment he is prepared to expend here. ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell you education education and education. (ll. 85–7) He develops his ideas in the back of a car on a motorway and concludes them over images of himself playing tennis and visiting a school. In the process he refers to Thatcher’s brand of ‘conviction’ politics in an attempt to show that he too believes passionately in certain ‘principles’ (although it is interesting – and probably strategically significant – that he should choose to compare his ‘big passion’ with that of a Conservative Prime Minister whose trade union ‘reforms’ were seen as an unwarrantable attack on working people by previous Labour leaders): when I say education education education what that means is not just all the specifics of policy it means that I am prepared to put every single bit of drive

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and energy that I’ve got into changing the education system of this country. (ll. 99–104) For me education is almost like trade union reform was for Margaret Thatcher. To me education is the big passion. It’s the thing that you know should drive everything that we’re doing. (ll. 105–9) Although his remarks lack detail, Blair communicates passion about the subject. Such a demonstration of personal commitment to education is congruent with the broad Labour tradition in which education is seen as a means of bringing about democracy and social equality. Blair also uses the Labour party’s ‘heritage’ when he deals with the subject of health-care. With his wife he visits children in hospital and we hear him in voiceover claiming that: there is a battle for resources in the National Health Service because we’re spending so much money now on increased administration. But it it’s more than just about the resources in the health service. What’s really happening is that the Conservatives don’t understand why we created the health service they don’t understand it. The health service to me is a living breathing symbol of what a decent civilized society should mean in practice. (ll. 148–57) Blair ‘personalizes’ the issue of the health service by appropriating the language of an earlier Labour discourse (‘a living breathing symbol of what a decent civilized society should mean’). He presents himself as leader of the only party with the legitimacy to speak about the National Health Service. It is a powerful move which does away with the need to make any substantive policy claims: Blair makes no commitment to action, though he does imply that his values are decent and civilized. But his approach towards unemployment differs significantly from his approach to health and education: if a family’s got people in the home where no-one’s working how can the kids grow up with any sense of the work ethic any sense of turning up to work on time earning a wage? Then they start living in a different culture in a different society and when that actually happens then all the other problems come with them – all the crime, all the drugs, benefit bills. (ll. 113–20) Here the family is presented as a corporate entity capable of possession. It is quite possible to think of a family ‘having’ a car or a new kitchen, but it is more unusual to think of a family ‘having’ people. A family without a car is still a family, but what is a family without people? The phrase ‘if a family’s got people in the home’ builds up an expectation that Blair is about to single out particular unemployed people in the family – we might logically expect it to continue ‘who aren’t working’. But instead Blair continues with ‘where no-one’s working’. Why does he choose this particular wording? Then Blair shifts from the workless home to the effects this might have on ‘the kids’. His concern is that the children of

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unemployed parents will never develop ‘the work ethic’. The implication here is that the reason the parents have not got jobs is that they themselves do not possess the work ethic, so they will not be able to pass it on to their children. ‘Then’, continues Blair, ‘they start living in a different culture, in a different society’. A high degree of certainty about the truth of the proposition is encoded here. Blair is expressing a personal view, but passing it off as something which is widely taken for granted. There is no hint that the link between an absence of ‘the work ethic’ and young people ‘living in a different culture . . . different society’ might be a complex one. Here Blair seems to be referring to what elsewhere in the developing discourses of new Labour is referred to as ‘social exclusion’ (see Fairclough, 2000: 51–65). This ‘sub-cultural’ view serves to present a combination of linked problems such as under- and un-employment, low income, bad housing and areas of high crime as a single endemic condition affecting a different place, outside ‘our’ society. Blair’s language here enacts social exclusion by compartmentalizing society. We might also note that the ‘kids’ who ‘keep you grounded’ have been transformed into ‘the kids’ whose ‘benefits bills’ represent a tax burden for the rest of ‘us’.

4 Self and other referencing Political discourse is often constructed around the axis of ‘us’ and ‘them’. In most propaganda, positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation are relatively unproblematic. However, it is perhaps more difficult to make direct attacks on the policies and political ideologies of your opponents using the genre of ‘biographical portrait’, because the demands for narrative and intimacy could unsettle the audience and undermine the function of the piece, which is to generate a positive response to the party leader. Therefore more subtle strategies are used to describe opponents (and to present Blair and his party’s policies and achievements positively). In this section I will examine the role played by pronominal choice in the organization of the text. As Chilton and Schäffner (1997) point out, ‘analysts of political discourse frequently find that pronouns and the meanings associated with them give a kind of map of the socio-political relationships implicit in a discourse’ (1997: 216).

4.1 ‘I’ and ‘my’ It seems reasonable to expect a high frequency of the first-person pronoun ‘I’ for self-referencing in a genre such as this. ‘I’ occurs 20 times as the subject of verbs which signal mental processes (perception/cognition/affection) and verbal processes (saying). It is the subject of think (6 times), mean (4 times), imagine (twice) and say (4 times). ‘I’ and its variants occur most frequently in contexts

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where Blair is talking about his childhood – ‘my ambition when I was a child’ (l. 19); ‘I kept trying to talk my dad’ (l. 21) – or reflecting generally on broad aspects of society – ‘I think that in the end you actually fulful I think you fulfil your ambitions’ (ll. 62–4); ‘I just feel people have got to understand things can change I mean it’s just so daft to think they couldn’t be better’ (ll. 7–8). There is no ‘I’ which unambiguously stands for Blair as party leader, except in the extracts from the speeches. Why does Blair seem to avoid this political ‘I’? The implied aim of the broadcast is to ‘get behind the image’ of Tony Blair, which means that his ‘public’ face is less significant than the ‘private’ aspects of his life, hence the use of the personal, nostalgic and reflective ‘I’. But this is, of course, a political broadcast with a clear aim. There may be political as well as generic reasons for Blair’s avoidance of the public ‘I’. For example, the use of ‘I’ often implies that the speaker is taking personal responsibility for a particular course of action (which might leave him or her open to attack from opponents). However, the political/rhetorical significance of Blair’s self-referencing strategy is perhaps more clearly seen in his use of ‘you’ and ‘we’. 4.2 ‘You’, ‘your’, ‘yourself ’ You and your occur 58 times. Blair uses them 10 times as a second-person pronoun to address his children and the interviewer. The remaining occurrences are more complicated, and have an important role in the persuasive function of the text. According to Wilson, you can be used as an indefinite pronoun to reflect ‘conventional wisdom as opposed to actual experience’ (1990: 57). Its ‘generic’ flavour (see Wales, 1996: 179–84), in sayings like ‘You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’ or ‘You only live once’, means that it is often used in the communication of ‘common sense’ values and notions. I would argue that something like this is happening in lines 8–18: there is a part of you that constantly wonders whether it is worth staying in politics because of all the the the rubbish that you have to do I mean you you just have to do it. You’ve just got to keep a grip of yourself and and hope that your humanity sees you through and and in the end understand why you want to be in it. What I keep saying to people is get behind the image. It’s quite difficult to bring people to actually see the type of person you are. ‘I’ here is possible – so why does he not use it to express closer commitment to what he is saying? He is claiming that an ‘image’ has been created which people must look behind, but by using ‘you’ he subtly implies that he is not the only victim of this image-making, and that the process is part of a general sociopolitical order over which politicians have no control. The use of ‘I’ would perhaps draw attention to the fact that Blair shared some responsibility for the increased emphasis on style in British politics. It suits Blair’s strategy to present image-making as a fact of nature beyond his influence, because it generates sympathy for him.

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‘You’ is also used here to claim solidarity with the audience. The implication is that in many domains of contemporary life people have to ‘keep a grip’ (modern life is tough and stressful) and that it pays to ‘look behind the image’ (modern life is a performance and authenticity is a key social value). The use of ‘I’ would have focused the audience’s attention on Blair alone, and the wider perspective would have been lost. In lines 70–3 the context suggests that he’s talking about his own children, but his preference for ‘you’ over ‘me’ (‘the kids they keep you grounded’) is a further claim for solidarity. Children remind Blair of the reason why he is in politics, and the use of ‘you’ conveys the ‘normality’ of having children. Intriguingly, in the personal narrative about his father’s serious illness, Blair switches from ‘I’ to ‘you’: ‘when I was twenty-one you got a sense of urgency into your life’ (ll. 175–6). This, like his use of first-person ‘you’ at the beginning of the broadcast, might be a distancing strategy. Blair is temporally removed from the ‘self’ of his youth, and he is addressing that self as ‘you’, reporting back what he said to himself at the time. An earlier pronominal switch is also revealing: I I I just think that for a whole generation of people they thought that if they arrived and did well then you became a Tory . . . It’s like people used to say well if you bought your house if you owned your own home then you were a Tory. (ll. 39–44) The shift from they to you is connected with Blair’s use of ‘they’ as a means of referring to others in the text. They and its variants their and them occur 20 times. However, Blair seems not to use these pronouns neutrally. For example, he refers to the Conservatives twice using they (ll. 27 and 154), once using them (l. 189) and their (l. 183). Other instances occur in contexts which might be described as ‘negative’, such as when he addresses the political cynicism of the public (ll. 132–47) and l. 186). Is ‘they’ being used as a distancing strategy? This seems to be the case when he chooses they rather than you to talk about children growing up in areas of unemployment: how can the kids grow up with any sense of the work ethic, any sense of turning up to work on time earning a wage? Then they start living in a different culture in a different society. (ll. 114–18) The use of you might imply a commonality of experience linking Blair and ‘people in general’ too closely to a marginal social group. It could also convey a degree of solidarity with this group which might not be in Blair’s political interests. If we return now to ll. 39–44 we can perhaps make more sense of Blair’s pronominal choices. ‘You became a Tory’ is preferred over ‘they became a Tory’ because Blair needs to stress that no ‘blame’ attaches to those ‘successful’ people who voted Conservative in the past, that such an action was natural and inevitable. You also signals Blair’s solidarity with these people. This is a key political strategy since he needs Conservative voters to switch to Labour to win the election.

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4.3 ‘We’, ‘us’, ‘our’ The constantly ‘shifting reference of we [is an] important’ resource ‘in political discourse’ (Fairclough, 1995: 181). We, us, and our occur 16 times, once and twice respectively. Blair uses we twice in an unambiguous, personal fashion to refer to himself and his family. However, the other 14 uses have a more complex function. The following extracts illustrate his use of inclusive ‘we’: ‘it’s so crazy that today we spend more on unemployment than we do on education’ (ll. 110–12); ‘we’re spending so much money now on increased administration’ (ll. 149–50). Here, we aligns Blair with the British people. I think that the preferred reading of these extracts is to see Blair as a tax-payer, like ‘us’, expressing ‘our’ concern that ‘our’ money is being spent badly. In reality ‘we’ are not spending the money on ‘education, ‘ unemployment’, ‘increased administration’ in the National Health Service, or anything else. The British people have no direct say over what happens to taxes – government decides on the distribution of revenues. The substitution of they for we would distance tax-payers from their money, whereas we emphasizes the point that it is ‘our’ money (and not theirs) that is being misspent. Ambiguity serves a useful function here. The resource of ambiguity is also drawn on where we is used exclusively: ‘it’s like what we did with the Labour party. We had a clear series of objectives to modernize the Labour party, bring it up to date and we’ve got to do the same with the country’ (ll. 95–8). The first two occurrences of we have a somewhat vague reference. Individuals frequently use we to refer to themselves and other members of a corporate body to which they belong, such as a company, school or political party. It is not clear whether that is the case here. Those initial we’s are used by Blair to signal his membership of a particular sub-group (unnamed) within a larger corporate entity (the Labour party). Does this affect the audience’s reaction to the third we? I assume that Blair means it to refer to the ‘new’ Labour party, which has been ‘modernized’ by the unnamed group referred to by the initial we. However, this we carries an echo of the previous two occurrences, which referred to a faction within Labour. Is it his group which maintains power within Labour, or is Labour now fully new Labour, with all ideological differences ironed out? A further possibility is that we is being used very powerfully here as a way of co-opting the British people (we) into the modernizing process which Blair deems to be so necessary for the country (got to signals the strength of this declaration). Blair also uses we to exclude his political opponents: ‘the Conservatives don’t understand why we created the health service, they don’t understand it’ (ll. 153–5). Who is we here? Blair could be using we to associate himself with the (historical) Labour party – forming a link with the radical post-war Labour administration and revisiting his Socialist roots. However, the we here might also refer to the British people, to the exclusion of the Conservative party. This associates Blair with a particular construct of the British people, which emphasizes their traditional loyalty to the ideals the values of the welfare state (a construct which excludes the Conservatives).

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5 Conclusion This biographical, personality-orientated strategy is not risk-free. There is a ‘general’ risk which arises when public and private domains come together. As Montgomery points out with reference to the public tributes given to Princess Diana after her death, sincerity is widely seen as ‘a feature of the private rather than the public sphere – of intimate rather than public discourse’ (1999: 27). This means that public exposures of ‘the self’ are often met with suspicion. Perhaps this is even more likely when, as in a PEB, there is an obvious ‘ulterior motive’ behind the revelation. Also, there are more specific risks concerned with the film’s need to balance ‘biographical’ and ‘propaganda’ functions. Sometimes, moments of personal revelation and intimacy – which are ‘good’ in biographical terms – also make ‘good’ propaganda, in that they positively and unambiguously emphasize Blair’s strengths. For instance, great effort is expended to suggest that the Blair we see is the real Tony Blair. This authenticity is conveyed in a number of ways. At home he dresses casually and drinks tea from an eclectic range of mugs; he expresses cynicism about politics and politicians; he wonders whether it is worth ‘staying in politics’ because of all the ‘rubbish’ involved; he reveals his love of football (which was de rigueur for middle-class males in 1990s Britain); he is seen getting on with his children; he is not afraid to express his emotions over his father’s illness and mother’s death; and in the children’s hospital ward, a trembling lower lip betrays his feelings. These elements project a set of ‘virtues’, among which are the avoidance of artifice or pretension, emotional openness, a willingness to acknowledge the influence of social and family background and an easy, ‘democratic’ personal style. But it is not only what he says that conveys authenticity; the way he says it is significant. The extract below has been transcribed to give a flavour of Blair’s pauses and hesitancies: wh when my father became ill when I was (2.0) um (1.0) ten (1.0) eleven (1.0) and he er had a stroke and all our lives changed after that really (2.0) well for the first twenty-four hours we weren’t sure whether he was gonna live or not so (1.0) then then that was ok but then when he came back home he really couldn’t do anything (1.0) which was very tough for him because he was a public speaker. (ll. 160–7) Perhaps the most striking features of the extract are the pauses lasting two seconds. This is a long time in connected speech – they give the impression that Blair is thinking carefully about what he’s going to say next, and that he finds the subject matter ‘difficult’. However, there are times when ‘biography’ and ‘propaganda’ clash, and certain inconvenient details lead to areas of dissonance. This is especially evident in Blair’s main biographical ‘difficulty’: his father was a barrister who wanted to be a Conservative MP. Blair does not conceal this, but he broaches the subject carefully. For example, a reference to his father’s power and status is ‘disguised’ in the context of comments about football: ‘I kept trying to talk my dad into using

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whatever meagre influence he had with the Newcastle United to get me a trial but he never did’ (ll. 21–4). Many ‘ordinary’ boys would like a trial with a football team, but fewer have fathers with such influence, even if it is disingenuously described as ‘meagre’. The anecdote prepares us for the subsequent revelation that: my dad was very active (0.5) I mean he was active in er (1.0) Tory politics actually locally in fact they had him lined up to fight a to fight a seat and become a member of parliament. (ll. 25–8) It would be difficult for Blair to disclose this facet of his political ‘heritage’ proudly and unequivocally, hence the revealing hedges, pauses and disfluencies. Such a display certainly makes good biography, but its propaganda function is less certain. Blair needs to control the dissonance, and he does this by incorporating his father’s political background and shifting loyalties into an attempt to exemplify what new Labour is about. For Blair it seems that the new Labour ‘project’ is to unite the ‘best’ features of the Conservative and Labour traditions: you can have a dynamic free market and social justice. Blair presents his own biography and personality as a symbol of this synthesis. He is vigorous, active, driven – the attributes of a successful business leader; yet he is also compassionate and caring – traditional social democratic qualities. And the propaganda function of his father’s conversion to Labour is to suggest that if a retired barrister and prospective Tory MP can vote new Labour, then surely you can too. Through such strategies the delicate balance between propaganda and biography is maintained.

Notes 1 2 3 4

These are: A Man to Trust (1970), about Edward Heath; an untitled portrait of Neil Kinnock (1987); and The Journey (1992), which shows John Major revisiting his Brixton roots. The Blair film was broadcast on BBC1 on 24 April 1997. Dineen’s credits include a film about London Zoo (The Ark: BBC 1993) and a portrait of exSpice Girl Geri Halliwell (Channel 4 1999). Recent examples of ‘celebrity’ documentaries include Tantrums and Tiaras, about the pop star Elton John (Cinemax 1997), and The David Beckham Story (ITV 2000). The line numbers refer to the transcript in the appendix. The transcript contains no punctuation, but I have lightly punctuated the examples in the main body of the article for ease of reading.

References Chilton, P. and Schäffner, C. (1997) ‘Discourse and Politics’, in T.A. Van Dijk (ed.) Discourse as Social Interaction, pp. 206–30. London: Sage. Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Arnold. Fairclough, N. (2000) New Labour, New Language? London: Routledge. Holland, P. (1997) The Television Handbook. London: Routledge. Montgomery, M. (1999) ‘Speaking Sincerely: Public Reactions to the Death of Diana’, Language and Literature 8(1): 5–33.

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Morreale, J. (1993) The Presidential Campaign Film: A Critical History. Westport, CT: Praeger. Plantinga, C.R. (1997) Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenbaum, M. (1997) From Soapbox to Soundbite: Party Political Campaigning in Britain since 1945. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wales, K. (1996) Personal Pronouns in Present-day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, J. (1990) Politically Speaking. Oxford: Blackwell.

Appendix Transcript of broadcast (Italics indicate sections of speech in voice-over) Visuals

Text

Blair in back of car: night

TONY BLAIR: if you’d said to me at sort of eighteen nineteen you’re gonna be a politician I’d’ve said forget it anything else anything but being a politician 5

DINEEN: why on what grounds why TONY BLAIR: oh cos I thought politicians were complete pains in the backside

footage of Blair signing a giant campaign poster, surrounded by press photographers and television camera crews

10

15

and there is a part of you that constantly wonders whether it is worth staying in politics because of all the the the rubbish that you have to do I mean you you just have to do it you’ve just got to keep a grip of yourself and and hope that your humanity sees you through and and in the end understand why you want to be in it what I keep saying to people is get behind the image it’s quite difficult to bring people to actually see the type of person you are

back of car: night 20

Blair in his kitchen

25

30

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my ambition when I was a child was to play football for Newcastle United that was my greatest ambition and I kept trying to talk my dad into using whatever meagre influence he had with the Newcastle United to get me a trial but he never did because my dad was very active I mean he was active in er Tory politics actually locally in fact they had him lined up to fight a to fight a seat and become a member of parliament but then he became very ill so everything he gave up everything but we we discussed it and then when I started really being Labour there was a

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slight problem for a time but he never really objected to it because he’s come over to the Labour party now so it’s all fine footage of Blair playing football with a group 35 of children

I think my generation is trying to get to a different type of politics which is rooted in strong values and convictions but it’s not quite left and right in the way that it’s been before

Blair in kitchen

I I I just think that for a whole generation of people they thought that if they arrived and did well then you became a Tory you know it’s like people used to say well if you bought your own house if you owned your own home then you were a Tory it’s crazy stuff

40

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I’ve always understood because of dad why some people who’ve done very well come up in life made it on their own felt the Tory party was the party that was for them because it was the party of ambition and aspiration and that the Labour party somehow wasn’t and I think to an extent I mean that’s what the Labour party became it became too stuck in the past too rooted in the [inaudible] that’s where you are that’s where you stay whereas today I think today the position has changed round what I’ve always wanted for today’s Labour party is to be the party of aspiration [inaudible] say you know you can have a society where there’s ambition without a lack of compassion and DINEEN: yes I was going to say so why aren’t you a Tory TONY BLAIR: because I think that in the end you actually fulfil I think you fulfil your ambitions better in a society where people have some sense of duty towards other people homework well you’re gonna have a lot of that under Labour you wait you wait till David Blunkett gets hold of you you’ll be doing a lot of homework ha ha ha

footage of Blair eating and chatting with his children at the kitchen table

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75 Blair in kitchen

the kids they keep you grounded because you’re seeing all through them and through their friends you know what’s actually happening all the time you just go back to understanding why you’re there and why you want to be in it there’s a sense in which I just feel people have got to understand things can change I mean it’s just so daft to think they couldn’t be better I mean it could be better you could if you

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footage of Blair giving a speech

MICHAEL PEARCE 80

decided on a even if you just decided right the education system let’s say education and welfare were gonna be the only things you’re worried about and everything else stayed the same even

85

ask me my three main priorities for government and I tell you education education and education

back of car: day 90

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100

Blair playing tennis

105

Close-up of Blair looking pensive cut with a child in school 110

Blair on train 115

120

125 footage of speech

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the job of being a politician is to change the country in the way that you think is right for the country [inaudible] there’s no point in being in it unless you want to change things if all you want to do is do your job you want to sit in the office behind a desk signing papers there’s not much point in doing it but it’s like anything you know it’s like what we did with the Labour party we had a clear series of objectives to modernize the Labour party bring it up to date and we’ve got to do the same with the country and it can be done so when I say education education education what that means is not just the specifics of policy it means that I am prepared to put every single bit of drive and energy that I’ve got into changing the education system of this country for me education is almost like trade union reform was for Margaret Thatcher for me education is the big passion it’s the thing that you know should drive everything that we’re doing which is one of the reasons why it’s so crazy that today we spend more on unemployment than we do on education if a family’s got people in the home where no-one’s working how can the kids grow up with any sense of the work ethic any sense of turning up to work on time earning a wage then they start living in a different culture in a different society and when that actually happens then all the other problems come with them all the crime all the drugs benefits bills and when I talk about getting young people off benefit and into work it’s not [inaudible] uncaring on the contrary the only proper true compassionate way to care is to say we’re gonna do something about that as the first step we will implement a programme to take two hundred and fifty thousand young people off benefit and into

GETTING BEHIND THE IMAGE 130 back of car: day

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Blair listens to an elderly woman complain about the NHS, then he visits a children’s hospital ward with his wife

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Blair in his kitchen

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work funded by a one-off windfall levy on the excess profits of the privatized monopoly utilities they say that there’s a great new Labour party that’s gonna change the world but you know they’re just cynical people are cynical about politics and politicians because they’ve had a government for at least for the past few years that have kept promising things never delivered them that has havered on one thing and another thing and people have almost got to the point where they say well what’s the use you’re all the same you know nothing’s ever gonna make any difference and of course the Tories in a sense delight in that because then people say well we may as well [inaudible] just stick to with what we’ve got but you don’t have to stick with what you’ve got it’s absurd to say that we cannot be better than this there is a battle for resources in the National Health Service because we’re spending so much money now on increased administration but it it’s more than just about the resources in the health service what’s really happening is that the Conservatives don’t understand why we created the health service they don’t understand it the health service to me is a living breathing symbol of what a decent civilized society should mean in practice helping people on the basis of their need not on the basis of their wealth wh when my father became ill when I was um ten eleven and he er had a stroke and all our lives changed after that really well for the first twenty-four hours we weren’t sure whether he was gonna live or not so then then that was ok but then when he came back home he really couldn’t do anything which was very tough for him because he was a public speaker he was a good public speaker he was a barrister a good public speaker so all those things had to stop he had to give up his political ambitions everything changed yeah well it was it was the amazing thing is he did actually rebuild his life and my mother of course she nursed him for three years taught him how to speak again and I think when my mother died when I was twenty-one you got a sense of urgency into your life [inaudible] do you know what I mean you suddenly thought well you’ve actually quite a short time you’ve got so you better get on you

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MICHAEL PEARCE 180

footage of Blair giving speech, intercut with Blair meeting people in street, boarding a plane and looking out the plane’s window 185

190 Blair in kitchen

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better get things done you better do things we must awaken and ignite in our people the hope that change can bring because the last weapon the Tories have you know their final weapon is despair and cynicism it’s telling people well it doesn’t matter who’s in power cos they’re all the same it’ll make no difference nothing can ever change rubbish off course things can change when they say don’t let Labour ruin it I say to them Britain can be better than this you see I can’t I couldn’t imagine myself actually sitting in Downing Street let’s say doing the job having those things going on out there and not be just like some sort of great galvanizing force driving through the change to make things better better I couldn’t imagine doing it

Address Michael Pearce, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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