David Cameron and Image

Until he went all pro-war, I used to read Nick Cohen every week. He's still worth checking out, though.

This week, he examines Frank Luntz, an American polling/focus group expert. It was Luntz's analysis, for Newsnight, of David Davis vs David Cameron that gave Cameron momentum, that gave him the mantle of "I can win back undecided voters." Now, even Conservatives are getting impatient with the lack of policy and the emphasis on husky dog spin and webcameron image.

The desperation of the Tories in 2005 produced an election without precedent. The findings of a focus group drove a hitherto obscure politician to the leadership of a major political party. Not a focus group hired by party managers anxious to uphold the best interests of their cause, but by a broadcaster as interested in entertainment as reputable market research.

British pollsters tell me that Luntz's work for Newsnight shouldn't have been allowed to influence a parish council election, never mind the future of a great party. Standard focus groups have six to eight members ... Newsnight had Luntz meet 28 voters ... focus groups are also meant to be focused ... Newsnight mixed up people who had always voted Tory with people who had once voted Tory and people who had never voted Tory. The danger of a large and diverse group is that the loudest voices will dominate and a herd mentality will take over.

Maybe it shouldn't be such a surprise that Mori reported in The Observer last week that Cameron's personal ratings had collapsed after his honeymoon period because voters didn't know what he believed in.

If you are created by the entertainment industry, you must expect the public to treat what you say as mere showbiz.

Jean Calder is a freelance journalist who writes a column for the Argus, in Brighton:

Cameron's ‘spin’ machine rivals anything Labour could have produced, and, of recent weeks he has been rewarded by a media love affair. He’s photogenic and highly skilled and has worked journalists like a trooper, carefully constructing an image of himself as a man of the people, essentially middle class, who cycles, shops at ASDA and looks after his disabled son. The newspapers have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

His Eton education could have posed a problem for Cameron, but he managed to represent it as a school to which hard working middle class people send their children, rather than as the centuries old institution which has prepared generations of this country’s aristocracy for leadership. Cameron, as well as being the son of a well to do old Etonian stockbroker, is also, on his mother’s side, a descendant of King William 4th. He is married to the daughter of another old Etonian whose estate has been in the family since 1590.

This is no ‘ordinary’ couple. And he is no man of the people.

Cameron spent seven years with ITV television company Carlton, as head of corporate communications. Jeff Randall, ex BBC business editor writing in The Daily Telegraph where he is a senior executive, had dealings with him at that time. He said: “In my experience, Cameron never gave a straight answer when dissemblance was a plausible alternative, which probably makes him perfectly suited for the role he now seeks: the next Tony Blair.” He added that he would not trust Cameron “with my daughter’s pocket money”.

Sun business editor Ian King, recalling the same era, was even more cutting, describing Cameron as a “poisonous, slippery individual”.

Freedland wrote: “Again and again, Cameron may talk left, but he remains a man of the right. The work-life balance is a favoured theme, constantly advertising his own hands-on involvement in family duties, yet in 2002 he voted against a battery of measures that would have extended maternity leave to 26 weeks, raised maternity pay to and introduced 2 weeks paid leave for fathers as well as leave for adoptive parents. Most strikingly, given his own circumstances, he voted against giving parents of young or disabled children the right to request flexible working.”