The Metropolis

Who is doing negative campaigning better, Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson?

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 6 March, 2012 12:38

This campaign will end up as clean and positive as a Haye/Chisora boxing brawl. Both major candidates are going negative with some of their material, because it works and they want to win. But judging by their latest offerings, who is doing it best?

Boris Johnson’s latest negative campaigning

Here’s a poster from NotKenAgain, the evil twin website of the sickeningly positive BackBoris2012.

From a list of six things which Ken “wants” to bring back, four are nebulous references to long-forgotten political scuffles. If you’re a nerd you can no doubt reel off the specific charges that “cronies, broken promises, scandals and waste” refer to. For the voter on the Clapham Omnibus, these are words without context and so without meaning.

“Council tax rises and Bob Crow”, however. Now the voter knows where they stand. Boo to both of those, I imagine. So expect a relentless focus on these two issues, the rest is just mood music.

Ken Livingstone’s latest negative campaigning

First of all, is showing a Boris Johnson lookalike riding peacefully and safely through the streets of London on a Boris bike, one of the few concrete achievements of Mayor Johnson’s time in office, a useful image for the Ken campaign to spread?

I’d suggest that NO! Of course it isn’t.

The message about two jobs Johnson has the potential to resonate, but the problem with casting Mayor Johnson as a satirically sympathetic figure is that many voters view him as an actually sympathetic figure. We’ve been here before with the poster campaign depicting Johnson as a cheeky pickpocket.

Ken’s team is consistently portraying Boris Johnson according to Boris’s own self-image.

That’s a problem, because the whole point of nasty campaigning is to tear down a candidate’s facade. Johnson’s team aren’t doing that brilliantly, but they’re doing it a damn sight better than Livingstone’s.

See also:

Ken Livingstone’s pickpocket poster plays into Mayor Johnson’s hands

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