The British Conservative opposition leader Michael Howard on Tuesday paved the way for a bitter end to the general election campaign when his party launched a United Kingdom-wide poster campaign explicitly condemning Tony Blair as a liar.
In an echo of the Conservatives’ notorious ”demon eyes” of 1997, the leadership unveiled a poster of a shifty-looking Blair standing next to a stark message. ”If he’s prepared to lie to take us to war, he’s prepared to lie to win an election,” it says in black lettering on a dark red background.
In a play on Labour’s latest message imploring people to vote for what they value, it adds: ”If you value the truth, vote for it.”
Howard was this week unapologetic about the poster, which includes language that would be ruled out of order in the House of Commons.
”I’m a very direct person. I say it as it is,” he said during a visit to Birmingham. ”Character is an issue at this election. It is about trust.”
At his morning press conference on Tuesday, Howard defended his decision to describe the prime minister as a liar for three reasons:
The so-called ”dodgy dossier” of February 2003, which the prime minister claimed was based on intelligence but was in fact ”pulled off” the Internet;
The prime minister’s claim in September 2002 that intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was ”extensive, detailed and authoritative” when Lord Butler depicted it in his report last year as ”limited, sporadic and patchy”; and
The prime minister and Lord Goldsmith, the UK’s Attorney General, had ”directly contradicted each other” about advice on the legality of the Iraq war.
The poster is a gamble for Howard — on the day after he admitted he was ”two goals down” — because he was such an enthusiastic supporter of military action. But he believes that voters across the spectrum, including opponents and supporters of the war, will share his belief that Iraq highlighted wider questions about the prime minister’s trustworthiness.
One aide said: ”Trust really is the fundamental issue. War is the lightning conductor but he lied on top-up fees. So Michael is saying you can’t trust Labour on tax — because of the 66 stealth taxes — and you can’t trust him on health because he said in 1997 there was 24 hours to save the NHS (British health service). Can you trust anyone who says that and then fails to deliver?”
Labour will have mixed feelings about the poster because Blair needs no reminding that anger about Iraq has made him one of the party’s main liabilities. But Labour strategists believe the Tories’s decision to attack him in such personal terms shows Howard ”has nothing to say” about the voters’ main concerns — schools and hospitals.
In a sign that the Tories are embarking on a negative end to the campaign, one of Australia’s toughest political operators has flown in to help the party.
Mark Textor, who has allegedly deployed the United States tactic of ”push polling” to spread damaging information about opponents under the guise of questions, was photographed by the Labour party entering Tory headquarters.
The Conservatives said they had never hidden the fact that Textor, a business partner of the party’s Australian campaign director, Lynton Crosby, would help out.
British public still respect Blair
Meanwhile, Alan Travis reports that the British public think that Blair may be a liar, fairly slippery and not to be trusted — but they respect him, and believe he has the charisma required of a prime minister, according to this week’s UK election poll carried out by pollsters ICM for The Guardian.
By contrast, Howard is regarded as more honest, equally respected, but almost as untrustworthy and certainly as slippery — and voters do not think he has Blair’s charisma. Even 75% of Tory voters do not think Howard has got what it takes.
This difference underlies the central finding of this week’s poll: the Conservatives’ aggressive campaign to impugn Blair’s personal integrity is in fact fuelling a sharp rise in his popularity as the campaign goes into the final seven days.
The ICM poll suggests the public have been unimpressed by the Tory campaign around Blair’s character. As Labour’s lead has extended to seven points, Blair’s personal rating has shot up six points in the last week to a point where 44% of all voters name him as the party leader who would make the best prime minister, while Howard’s personal rating has slumped in the past fortnight from 27% to 22%.
Even among Tory voters more than half say Blair has the charisma to be prime minister, while only 24% of them regard Howard in this way.
It suggests that the more the public see of Howard, the less they like him, and the better Blair looks by comparison. This effect is magnified because the Conservatives have put the media spotlight almost entirely on their leader.
Asked if Blair is a liar, more voters, 44%, agreed that he was, than those who saw Howard as a liar, 29%. But a greater proportion of voters, 49%, believed Blair was not a liar. Two-thirds of Conservative voters saw him as a liar, and 28% as not. Liberal Democrat voters split half and half. And 77% of Labour voters said he was not a liar, while a fifth said he was. — Â