The Labour party's attempt to discredit Nick Clegg as a man of little consequence in its latest Party Political that's filmed as a kind of filmic satire through start-up agency Lucky Generals is pretty questionable.
For a start, such a personal attack can only really be interpreted by anyone with a reasonable number of brain cells as a blatant and desperate attempt by Labour to steal votes from the Lib Dems. The motif isn't even thinly veiled here. Of course, the idea of reducing the Lib Dems to small, vertically challenged individuals of no real worth isn't new. Spitting Image famously reduced David Steel to a very small player who lived in David Owen's pocket. And I strongly suspect that the damage this image did to the SDP was instrumental in selling the idea to the Labour party. But if you're going to knock individuals, for heaven's sake do it properly. The casting for this satire is shockingly bad. Clegg and Cameron don't look or sound like the men they're meant to represent. Had the commercial been made by Fluck and Law with their famous latex puppets with voices provided by the likes of Rory Bremner, the thing might have just about worked. And it might have been a great deal funnier. As it was, the film lacked credibility and wasn't actually at all funny, which was a shame, because there was certainly an opportunity here to do something radically different.
This aside, personal attacks always look pretty mean-spirited. The Great British public are not great lovers of these kind of tactics. The best and most effective political ads have arguably always focussed on the policies. Think of all those brilliant ads that Saatchis did for Thatcher. None of those picked on individuals; they always tore into the policies.
The only other campaign that revolved around a personal attack came in the form of those 'Demon Eyes' of Tony Blair. And we all know what happened after that campaign, don't we?
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