Driving expectations

By Emma Burnell / @scarletstand

I’m taking my driving test for the first time on Monday. That’s how everyone puts it too – the first time – which seems to imply that it won’t be the last. Am I and those I talk to setting myself up for failure? Will the expectation of failure be a self-fulfilling prophesy or a spur to defy the odds? I expect that depends on how I manage my expectations. Possibly to an extent, how I manage the expectations of my examiner.

The expectation game is interesting in all walks of life, no more so than in politics. At my driving test there will be me and my examiner. In politics – especially at election time, the audience is massive. The amount of people who see you succeed or fail (or somewhere in between like Cameron in 2010) is huge. The amount of people with something invested in your success or failure – even in this apathetic age – is huge. There’s a lot of expectation out there to be managed.

Expectation management is a subtle and extremely difficult art. You need to exude the confidence of winners without allowing you to either look or act complacent. You have to downplay disasters without looking out of touch with reality.

Modern media is also making expectation management significantly more difficult. Once upon a time you could tell the lobby journalists what you were going to say so it would be in the morning papers and by the time you’d changed your mind for the nightly news it was so long ago you’d forgotten the details. But online news from both traditional and the spikier non-traditional sources have made that strategy impossible (despite spinners from all Party’s sticking rigidly to the format). So the best lines of your speech are picked apart and dissected before you make it and if there’s a cat sized gaffe of credit card bill proportions, the picking apart is what features on the nightly news.

If we want to get decent coverage of our political speeches perhaps we need a more innovative system that the current The Mirror, Signal, Manoeuvre (I’m so sorry!). Perhaps instead of signposting our key lines before they are uttered by our senior politicians, we should allow the rhetoric to speak first and the interpretation to come next. This doesn’t mean not talking to the media before a speech, but it can and should mean being more imaginative in those conversations than just rehearsing the key lines. Our actions beforehand should signal intent, and afterwards confidence in our direction.

A good spinner, like a good driver, is considerate of the needs of others while also retaining a focus on achieving their eventual destination. They are also aware of the terrain and conditions in which they are working. Spin can’t and shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. Our current political spin has to be conscious of the difficult conditions working against us and work with the best tools available to prevail. Just as the scrutiny of the Internet means that shabby lines can be easily torn apart, equally the amplification available to an attractive and authentic message is beyond the measure of what the traditional media. Equally the peer-to-peer nature of message sharing, when done right, is the most trusted medium in the book.

I won’t be driving at 80 miles per hour on Monday, nor do expect to execute any U-turns. My intent is to prove I am a calm and capable person, responsible enough to be left in sole charge of a powerful machine. When I see how others behave, the mistakes they make, the unthinking selfishness and the lack of direction, I know that I certainly have that in me. I know Labour does too.