Has a Labour leader ever been so absent from his party’s election literature?
A fine piece of work by Kiran Stacey and Dina Rickman has shown that just one in eight Labour leaflets actually mention the prime minister. Forget the man of granite, in this ground campaign Brown is the invisible man.
Kiran and Dina waded through 758 leaflets from all three parties in 168 constituencies and only found 9 — yes 9 — Labour leaflets that included a picture of Brown. Most of the images were no more bigger than a few centimetres.
Even cabinet ministers seem to prefer pictures of themselves to pictures of the Great Leader. Yvette Cooper mentions Cameron but not Brown. And Tessa Jowell only name-checks herself. You can see all the leaflets collected at The Straight Choice.
The Tories seem much happier to plaster the face of the prime minister all over their literature. A third of the leaflets — compared to 12 per cent of Labour ones — either name-check or picture the prime minister.
One last finding of note from their survey: Labour appear to be running a more aggressive campaign on the ground. Half the Labour leaflets include explicit anti-Tory messages but only a fifth of Tory ones attack Labour.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey