Retro stuff is very popular at the moment. To my surprise long playing vinyl albums have appeared in my local supermarket. The format is antique, and so are the acts that featured. The Beatles, Miles Davis etc. It was like stepping back into the seventies. Being old enough to remember the seventies, that has a certain resonance. But much as I like to remember a time when I had less stomach and more hair, it can’t be entirely down to nostalgia. Some people must be buying these things who weren’t around when they came out.
The thing is, much as I really enjoy being able to listen to just about any album I can think of on my phone, there is something about having a physical object that trumps a digital form. We are three dimesional analogue creatures, and reducing The Who Live At Leeds to basically a very big number - which is all a digital recording is after all - just doesn’t feel right.
And I wonder if this perhaps explains the otherwise inexplicable rise in Jeremy Corbyn’s ratings relative to the previously highly fancied Theresa May. Because on their previous form the prime minister should be running away with the race. She is a long serving and respected front bencher. She does her homework meticulously and has artfully managed her political career. She has the best funded party behind her with considerable support in the press. On top of that she is the incumbent but hasn’t yet run up too many bits of baggage that might turn people off. She has even managed to be in exactly the right spot on Brexit. She was sort of on the borderline about it, which is just where the country seems to be.
And yet in this campaign the man who has so far only achieved not trashing Labour’s support quite as much as critics in his own party suggested is steadily gaining on her in the opinion polls both in the overall vote share in assessments of his suitability to be prime minister. Nobody saw this coming - not even the small, very small, band of his supporters.
I think the reason is perhaps quite simple. He has campaigned in the way that politics used to be done in the seventies. He has got out around the country to address public meetings. Mathematically this is crazy. He draws big crowds but they still only number in the hundreds. You can’t swing the millions of votes that Labour needs that way. But maybe the hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to see him still pick up that he was there somehow? I don’t know. He has also done a traditional manifesto outlining what the Labour Party stands for. It isn’t a big flashy thing full of photos and mood music. It’s what it is - a list of promises. And when he talks, he talks about policies and principles. He very rarely makes personal attacks on his opponents. And his speaking style shows that he is someone who is used to standing up in front of a crowd. His internal detractors have forced him to do rather a lot of practice on that front.
In contrast the Conservatives have relied on the black arts of spin and manipulation. Indeed at the beginning of the campaign they made the bizarre decision to downplay the name of the party in favour of that of their leader. An advertising executive would approve. But nobody else would.
Overall, the Conservatives still look like they’ll pull off a comfortable victory. And by doing so they’ll no doubt reinforce the paradigm that modern elections are about marketing rather than substance. But it is pleasing to know that the retro approach can still work at least well enough to give the men in suits some sleepless nights.
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