Sometimes, if you don’t keep a sharp lookout, these things just pass you by. I hadn’t noticed that a new verb – “to incept” – had crept into the language. If it means anything, which is doubtful, I suppose it means originating something. It doesn’t appear in any dictionary of mine, and until it does I shall treat it as a non-word.
So, where did it appear? In a booklet that arrived, uninvited, in the post, entitled: The Next Generation, sub-titled Parliamentary Candidates To Watch. This is published by Insight Public Affairs, a lobbying outfit so keen to get itself noticed that it offers copious advice on how to influence MPs and who to latch on to in the parliament of 2010. By the way, it also gives thumbnail sketches of rising stars and “expert” assessments of the main political parties. Plus there are a few useful tables on target seats sourced to UK Polling Report and a list of retiring MPs which, naturally, grows more out of date the closer polling day looms.
Some of this is quite interesting stuff – amusing, even, although not necessarily deliberately. It’s only when you get to the back page that you come to the incepting bit. In prose that could only have been manufactured by the very finest drivel machine, the company boasts: “We have an outstanding track-record delivering successful government relations campaigns, incepting high-profile and high-impact media campaigns, and managing our client’s reputations to Westminster policy-makers and consumer audiences.”
Get that profile. Get that impact. Get that immaculate inception.
Insight further offers “key services”, including something called “thought-leadership platforms for policy engagement”. Oh, Orwell – where art thou when we need thee? And “comprehensive select committee rehearsal and briefings service.” In other words, we’ll tell you how to bamboozle MPs and which ones will listen to this sort of lobby-speak.
But you get the real nitty-gritty from Mark Wheeler, an account executive with Insight, who offers guidance on timing, approach and intelligence in “enlisting your parliamentary champions”. And there was me thinking that MPs are elected to represent their own views, or those of their party – or even the voters – rather than those of well-heeled lobbyists.
Judging by his picture, Mark Wheeler is about 14, but he can’t be quite as old as that because he thinks MPs hand over private casework to their successors. Under the Data Protection Act, they can’t.
Moving swiftly on, he writes: “We will see a wave of new MPs, on a par with the ’97 landslide, so contacting them early while still on the campaign trail is key. Otherwise, attempting to develop relationships and profile with them as soon as they enter Westminster will be futile.” In other words, catch ’em young, like him.
“Let them settle in and develop their own profile before making the approach, then catch them for a coffee”, he continues, with a Fagin-like confidence. “Many will be apprehensive at first about who to meet – and reluctant to risk upsetting colleagues by taking meetings outside their own brief.” There’s much more in this vein, before the conclusion that, if you listen to him, “you could find your parliamentary champions before you know it”.
Well, that’s always possible I suppose, but it’s also possible that after 12 years of Blairite spinners and lobbyists, the intake of 2010 might just be a tad sceptical about fresh-faced kids telling them what to vote for. “New” Labour ministers were unusually susceptible to this kind of lobby-babble, not least because so many of its practitioners were cut from the same cloth. Tony Blair’s parliaments were a monument to spin. I find it hard to believe that the next generation will be quite so impressionable.
And it’s clear who, in Insight’s view, will form the bulk of the next generation at Westminster. The booklet has a 30-page section on “candidates to watch”. Of these, 22 are Tories, only seven are Labour, with just two Liberal Democrats. In the number-crunching section, the booklet details Labour’s top 50 target seats – 12 of which are already held by the party. Whereas of the Top 100 Conservative target seats, only three are currently held by Tories. The underlying assumption is clear: the Tories are going to win and they must be the primary target for lobbyists.
There is even a brief contribution from Andrew Hawkins, the chief executive (these people are never anything less than an executive) of polling firm ComRes, headlined “Is Labour finished as a party?” It isn’t, he says, de haut en bas, but the next general election “will be the end of the political career of many of its current leaders”.
With great good fortune, it might also take down the inceptors a peg or two. They really shouldn’t be quite so full of themselves.
