Poster boys

Wise Words: election campaign

Brown could be on way out. Not the colour, the politician. The colour suits me, but the British electorate may soon decide that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown doesn’t suit them any more.

On Thursday, 6 May, British voters will decide Brown’s fate. Yesterday, he made a formal request to the Queen to dissolve Parliament and set the election day for 6 May. The race is on and the competitors are neck and neck.

This election campaign could be an exciting one. It could be fun, too.

There was fun already on 1 April, with The Guardian’s spoof Labour poster. It features Brown, looking quite threatening, and the text “Step outside posh boy. Vote Labour. Or else.”

If you ask someone to “step outside”, you show that you want to have a fight. “Posh boy” is the Conservative Party leader David Cameron, who went to the elite public school Eton. (Gordon Brown has already attacked Cameron for his privileged background, so it’s clear who is meant by “posh boy”.) We use “or else” to show that there will be trouble if something doesn’t happen. A lot of people fell for the April Fool’s joke, believing it was an official Labour poster and the story went viral on the internet.

Labour launched an official poster campaign on 5 April. Jacob Quagliozzi, a Labour supporter who had entered Labour’s poster competition, designed the official poster. It features David Cameron sitting on an Audi from the 80s, and the message reads, “Don’t let him take Britain back to the 1980s.” Quagliozzi explained the idea behind it: “I wanted to remind the public that David Cameron has failed to change the Conservative Party and show the threat they would pose to young people.” In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister. It was also a decade of high youth unemployment and the rise of the yuppie.

The image Quagliozzi used is taken from a cult BBC cop series, Ashes to Ashes, that is based in the 1980s. The main character is a politically incorrect police officer who likes to bend the rules to catch criminals. How did Cameron react to the comparison? He claims he liked it. He must have done, as the Tories immediately launched their own version of the poster. They used exactly the same image and a line borrowed from the TV character’s catchphrases. “Fire up the Quattro – it's time for change,” the Conservative version read.

Meanwhile, Labour fans are having fun changing the official Conservative posters — there is even a site just for that purpose. The site has been set up so anyone can add new slogans and political messages to the posters. I had more fun reading them than I did the originals. I told you this election campaign could be fun.