The Gillian Keegan incident, in which a Tory cabinet minister was caught criticising teachers around the country for ‘sitting on their a****’ off camera, triggered a flurry of damaging headlines for the Conservative party.
The media-slip from Keegan was, as a colleague remarked at the time, a political gaffe that wouldn’t feel out of place in The Thick of It. Comedy aside, it casts an interesting spotlight on the wider communications strategy of the Conservative Party throughout the RAAC debacle.
Making sturdy comments about political communications is complex. Communications strategies that would be effective when advising a company or academic institution, for instance, often don’t work in the world of politics.
Here are four key communications issues and how they could have been handled differently to give the Tories a better chance at winning over public opinion and trust throughout the RAAC saga:
1. Keegan’s media slippage. Accidents like this will inevitably happen from time to time during live broadcasts- but for anyone undertaking a live interview: always act as though your mic is still on, for as long as you’re anywhere near the studio. If you need to vent, as Keegan clearly did, wait until you are back in the safety of your bedroom, under your duvet, with your windows bubble wrapped. One can never be too careful. Keegan, being so highly media-trained, surely knew this - in fact, it’s such a schoolboy error that it invites the question of whether the comments were even a mistake at all…
2. The apology. Keegan was right to come out and apologise shortly after the issue. Whilst it goes some way towards evoking a bit of sympathy for her, in my view, she chooses the wrong thing to apologise for. She says sorry for her ‘choice language’, which is necessary, but she does not apologise to whoever she was accusing of ‘sitting on their a***s’. In terms of neutralising public acrimony, this should have been priority number one.
3. The Tory party’s understanding of the problem and defensive tone. From the get-go, the Tories saw this as a deeply political issue with public criticism levelled directly at them. Perhaps the responsibility does fall at the feet of the Department for Education and the Conservative Party more broadly for scrapping the 2010 Building Schools for the Future Project. However, as Keegan rather explicitly points out, the current cabinet are not directly to blame for schools crumbling across the country due to brittle RAAC concrete. Ironically, though, by assuming they were the primary target of public uproar and going into fight or flight, the Tories invited suspicion. This hyper-defensive tactic does little to avoid the blame, and much to antagonise the public further. And by escalating the issue to the level of political debate, it allowed the Labour Party, scenting blood, to give the Tories a tough time in parliament over an incident that didn’t need to become a drawn-out political issue.
4. Misunderstanding the audience. Immediately (and through natural political instinct) the Tories conjured up an angry mob of floating voters, wagging their fingers in heedful warning. Again, this was a misreading. Yes, in politics, everyone is a voter and tone therefore has to be finely tuned. But, in this case, the audience was teachers, parents and children who simply wanted the resumption of school as quickly and safely as possible. By coming out defensively, the Tories actually undermined their own position and just irritated people. If they had accepted the issue, apologised and focused on communicating their impatience to fix it, they would have both reassured people and restored their trust; it wouldn’t seem like they were trying to hide anything. One might be tempted to compare the RAAC issue to Justice Secretary Alex Chalk’s handling of the communications around the escape of terror suspect Daniel Khalife. Chalk begins by providing a comprehensive, itinerated list of questions that need to be investigated and answered. He gives an idea of an exact timeline within which he expects to ascertain the answers to these questions. Chalk then calmly goes on to explain all the work that the Conservative Party has done to benefit national security protocols, thereby pacifying public criticism. However, this comes second to an acknowledgement of the severity of the issue and the need for an urgent response. An issue that could have been frightening, and indeed highly inflammatory, was controlled and eased by Chalk’s assurance.
So, the Conservatives should have prioritised giving impacted people an idea of timeline and action. Parents whose children can’t go back to school and teachers who are in the dark feel powerless and ill-informed. The emphasis should have been on how to give people a degree of power back by answering a few vital questions: what exactly has led to this becoming such an issue? What are the material action plans for how to resolve it and when, honestly, can people expect these plans to be actualised? And, even if there is only so much you are able to relay, it’s crucial to convey as much concrete (pun intended) information as you possibly can.
Education is a highly emotive thing, to parents, teachers and children. Therefore, it is understandable that Keegan took things so personally because she is as invested in solving this issue as anyone else. However, she really needed to prioritise being as factual as she could to demonstrate that she was in control of the situation. And, in the absence of anything else, she needed to express deep and genuine regret that this was happening and that so many people were affected. That’s all that we, sat on our a**** over here, were really asking for.
By Jamie Lunnon, Account Executive
