One detail from Carina Trimingham’s unsuccessful legal action this week (possibly subject to appeal) is about using families in election leaflets:
Mr Justice Tugendhat said in a written judgment: “Ms Trimingham was not the purely private figure she claims to be. Her reasonable expectation of privacy has become limited.
“This is mainly by reason of her involvement with Mr Huhne, both professionally as his press agent and personally as his secret mistress, in circumstances where he campaigned with a leaflet to the electorate of Eastleigh about how much he valued his family.”
Regardless of the law, I’ve always preferred to leave families out of election leaflets – as if a politician uses a family as a reason to vote for them, it is hard then to turn round and say, “leave my family out of the news”.
Of course airbrushing all family references out can go to absurd lengths and particularly in a world of social media it can be extremely artificial to avoid any mention of family members.
But proactively featuring them in a way to win votes is something I’ve always tried to avoid and to persuade others of. There’s all the more reason to take that view after this week’s court ruling.
* Mark Pack is Party President and is the editor of Liberal Democrat Newswire.
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16 Comments
Seems very unfair to say that Carina Trimingham lost her right to privacy because Chris Huhne said he valued his family in his leaflets. After all, she was not officially part of his family!
I don’t understand why she lost her right to privacy regarding her sexuality when Max Mosely was held to have a right to privacy over his sexual proclivities.
@Alan Macro
“I don’t understand why she lost her right to privacy regarding her sexuality …..”
She did admit in court that she had sold stories about the sex lives of other people (including one Nick Clegg), so perhaps it was a case of “live by the sword, die by the sword”.
– this is blurring the issue, it’s not about the family as such, it’s about claiming something which is aiming to mislead the electorate about yourself… what it really means to say is ‘if you are going to set out to decieve the electorate don’t put your family in harm’s way by involving them in your lies’. Doing so simply says that you value your own ego above them, and the media are right to go after you if you do.
It is right to show that you have a family, as it gives the voter a flavour of the sort of person you are, and it also shows that your family are supportive of what you are trying to do. However it is vital that they understand what you are doing and how any reference or photo is to be used.
Peter, why does showing that you have a family give a voter a flavour of what sort of person you are? Almost everybody can breed, after all. Surely what you stand for as a politician is what matters – and you can stand for things without participating in them yourself.
The whole “wife and 2 kids” photo seems to be pandering to people’s old-fashioned stereotypes about what makes an “acceptable” politician. As liberals we should be advocating people’s freedom to form whatever social and family units work for them.
There is quite a lot of pressure on candidates to use family pictures – not so much in FOCUS but in those awful “Talk of the Town” magazine things used in target seats that are meant to look like “OK” or “Take a Break”. I think the nadir was reached when one of our MPs used an election mag to tell the electorate how his wife’s waters broke in their LOCAL church and how the baby was born in the (you guessed it) LOCAL hopital. Maybe a teeny bit too much information!
Ruth, you might find them awful – they’re certainly not something that appeals to me – but they seem to be pretty effective at getting a certain demographic to respond to our candidate and our messages. It’s another vector for communicating, just like a Focus and a street letter are separate methods.
David, you digress from the point which is, don’t portray yourself in a leaflet in a way that could come back to haunt you. Clearly if you involve your family in it then their interests need to be considered too, and you must avoid claiming something that an opponent can easily make hay with. And better that any person in a photo is anonymous, unless ‘who’ they are has clear relevance.
This is a fairly simple issue: don’t tell lies to the electorate as the truth is likely to find you out.
Dave (Page) is there any evidence that they are an effective way of getting people to vote for a candidate? They have always seemed like a tremendous waste of money to me – more of a leaflet writer’s wet dream than anything with any proven vote winning value.
The Huhne “my family is so important to me” leaflets were particularly cheesy and naff. The only time when delivering for the Lib Dems that I thought those “no junk mail” signs on the letterboxes might apply to what I was stuffing through. Of course, at the time, I did not know that they were also lies.
Ed – there seems to be a widespread belief (largely among the youngish graduate males who write the election material) that these cheesy/family leaflets appeal to less educated older female voters. I can’t believe there’s any proof to back this up.
Ed, you’d have to ask the party’s Department for Elections & Skills for the hard evidence, but my anecdata from Oldham East & Saddleworth is that people were stopping me on the street having seen my Lib Dem badge to talk positively about our candidate as a result of reading that magazine rather than a Focus leaflet.
Ed/Ruth – I have asked about this before and I remember being told that there is some evidence to back up that they work from the first couple of times they were used which I think might be Hartlepool and Sedgefield. Unfortunately I now can’t remember what the evidence said though. The style of magazine does vary from place to place though as one I’ve seen from Westmorland & Lonsdale looked a bit more like one of those country lifestyle magazines such as Yorkshire Life.
The original inspiration for the magazines was a very simple insight – go into your local high street and have a look at the style and format of printed publications which people choose to buy, and then use those in our literature. Colourful magazines full of pictures are a very popular style, and have to a large degree displaced more text heavy and black + white designs.
“I remember being told that there is some evidence to back up that they work from the first couple of times they were used which I think might be Hartlepool and Sedgefield. ”
Both of which we lost though. I did some canvassing in a street on the Sunday evening after I think the magazine was delivered on the Saturday which was awful – and in an area which looking at the housing type should have been strong for us.
@Ruth – they are style on the type of magazine with a high proportion of lower social class, mainly female readers so there is probably something in that. That however is a group which is the least likely to support the Lib Dems from polling I’ve seen – and also in all probability has low turnout rates. Whether they are the best demographic to be chasing in crude electoral terms is open to debate.
As they cost (roughly) 2-3 times the cost of a tabloid I’m not convinced they are worth it in “bangs per buck” terms.
Hywel – agreed. Everything those mags do can be done just as well (probably a lot better) by a colour campaign tabloid. I know you are not saying this but the type of voter who reads “Take A Break” or a similar magazine should not be defined solely by that readership. I am sure that many women voters who read that sort of thing also regularly watch and digest a serious TV news bulletin.