The media narrative and the story of the underdog that fought back

By Chris Rumfitt / @dispatchblog

From our earliest childhood, sat on our parents’ knees, we learn from stories. If you are a parent yourself, when you are with your child tonight you won’t sit down and give them a bland and neutral presentation of facts. You give them colour and dimension, and most importantly a narrative with a direction of travel. You give them a story.

And this is how all of us process information and arguments. All effective communications programmes I have ever worked on or seen have been based on this storytelling approach. Thinking back to the 1997 election the story offered to the electorate was effectively about whether they wanted to vote for the last government or the next one. And unsurprisingly for a whole host of reasons, they chose the future not the past, to borrow from one of the slogans of the campaign.

The direction of travel within a story is of huge importance, and when they tell a story, the media like to keep this direction of travel simple. For the last two years they have had a very clear direction of travel in the story they have told the country – an unelected social misfit as Prime Minister, in charge of a decaying Government that will struggle to see out its full term. (All their views not necessarily mine!) On the other side, they had a good-looking, young Blair clone modernising the formerly nasty party.

But there is another phenomenon in storytelling – they need to evolve and they need to change. And sometimes they need to surprise you. People get very bored with a story that never changes. Especially one where an outcome is promised (the collapse of the government or the departure of the PM) and it doesn’t actually transpire. In such cases a new narrative needs to be sought and a new direction of travel found.

I say this tentatively, very tentatively, but in the last week I think there is evidence the media might just be seeing the direction of travel of the new narrative to be the extraordinary recovery of Gordon Brown. Only this explains an opinion poll published today which saw Labour on 24%, and yet it was presented as bad news for the Tories. Only this explains at least three stories this week (the hypocrisy of promising a more pluralistic politics after 12 years which have been anything but, the u-turn on the Royal Mail, and trying to cover-up the Shahid Malik report) which could all have been reported in apocalyptic terms as disastrous for the Government, but have actually received fairly limited coverage.

My sense is that the story of the collapse of the Government and the election of David Cameron and the Tories has become too obvious and too boring a narrative for people. This story needs a twist. The media want a more interesting story, and it might just be (and I really stress the word might) that the story of the recovery of Labour and of Brown could be just that.

Wishful thinking? Quite possibly – but storytelling is as old as mankind, and the story of the underdog fighting back is one of the oldest of all. If the media starts to view politics through the prism of this underdog fighting back narrative it probably won’t be enough to save Labour and Brown, but it might just make the next 12 months a whole lot closer, and a whole lot more interesting, than they promised to be just a week ago.