In the early postwar years, Britain, with its dominant two-party structure, was not as open to U.S. consultants, which Napolitan described as a "chauvinistic shell". The Thatcher government (1979-1990), with its strong pro-business, pro-U.S., anti-union orientation, overcame such inhibitions. [T]he 1979 campaign of the Conservative Party made extensive use of techniques and personnel from the U.S., prompting [Larry] Sabato to remark that the "aloof and skeptical British politicians (were) coming around" (Farrell, 1998, p. 173). By coming around, he meant that Thatcher was willing to jettison the normal protocols of conducting British elections in favor of a new set of standards borrowed from consumer marketing and outside information management specialists. Thatcher approved the hiring of Saatchi and Saatchi for the creation of television advertisements and the staging of media events; activities orchestrated to attract the attention of eyes and cameras, timed to appear on nightly news broadcasts, and designed to shape the emotional response of voters. Harold Wilson, noting John F. Kennedy’s tactic of coining phrases in his speeches for the benefit of the evening news, did the same in his 1964 campaign for the Labour prime ministership (Mughan, 2000, p. 30; Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 93). This also appealed to broadcasters, because it gave them what they were looking for — the exhibition of personality and style as a media commodity. Edelman refers to this form of public communication as "political spectacle" (Edelman, 1988).

Although Britain more carefully regulates the exposure and campaign financing of candidates than the U.S., there is nonetheless a growing tendency of politicians, journalists, broadcast media, and campaign advisors in that country to be complicit in the use of soundbites, daily focus groups, news management, ‘rapid-response’ propaganda tactics, and spin-doctoring. There is also a broadly expressed "disdainful attitude toward . . . party-organized electioneering" (Blumler, Kavanagh, and Nossiter, 1996, p. 68). Probably the last of national politicians in Britain to resist this trend was the Labour leader, James Callaghan, who bluntly asserted in the 1979 campaign, "I don’t intend to end this campaign packaged like cornflakes. I shall continue to be myself" (cited in Mughan, 2000, p. 31). Despite its defeat, Labour’s subsequent titular head, Michael Foot, also refused to turn over electioneering to the media and the professionals. Foot’s successor, however, Neil Kinnock, put aside tradition and hired a director of communications, Peter Mandelson, who brought Labour into the sludge of ‘mediacracy’ (Mughan, 2000, pp. 30-31). "During the 1992 election, party leaders could expect TV soundbites of around 22 seconds on the Nine O’Clock News and 16 seconds on News at Ten" (Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 94).

One political observer found that like the United States, "British parties have also been transformed by the gradual evolution of the permanent campaign in which the techniques of spin-doctors, opinion polls, and professional media management are increasingly applied to routine everyday politics", although, she finds, British politics are far more ‘retail’ (direct citizen-politician contact) than its American counterpart (Norris, 2000, pp. 174-175). Still, there are important differences between British and American elections. For example, paid political advertising of the American sort is banned on British television and radio but can be bought in newspapers, billboards, and cinemas. Overall spending on national elections, while growing, is only a small fraction of American federal campaign expenditures (Barbash, 1997).

In a system of "rationed access" (Blumler and Gurevitch, 2001, p. 391), unlike the United States, British parties are allocated free air time (both on the public BBC and the commercial networks) for ‘party political broadcasts’ and ‘party election broadcasts’. UK television stations are required to provide balanced treatment of the political parties and can not transmit editorials on behalf of parties and candidates. Instead, the parties are awarded free broadcast air time based on their share of the vote in the previous election, while paid advertising is banned. The allotment for Labour and the Conservatives is five five-minute segments during a five-week campaign period, with four segments for the Liberals (Taylor, 2002, p. 20). The amount that parliamentary candidates can spend on their campaigns is determined by the number of voters in their constituencies, but the highest, as of the 1997 election, was about $13,000 (Grose, 1997). There are no limits on party spending or fund-raising.

By comparison, the average House race in the United States a year earlier was almost $1.1 million. The cost of all U.S. national elections in 2000 rose to about $4 billion, compared to $60 million for the 2001 British parliamentary elections, including that of the prime minister (Taylor, 3002, p. 20). Michael Bloomberg’s self-financed New York City mayoral campaign that year cost more ($74 million) than that. Political campaigns are also considerably shorter in Britain, with the 1997 election season lasting 45 days, which is relatively long by British standards. And there are fewer opportunities for individual British politicians to seek outside professional assistance, inasmuch as the selection of the party candidates is an internal affair, which, compared to the U.S., gives parties more political leverage over them (Bartle & Griffiths, 2001, p. 13). British voters as well as MPs are considerably more likely to vote strictly along party lines than their American counterparts.

However, British parties are increasingly employing professional image makers to do their political advertisements and marketing. Saatchi and Saatchi went to work for Margaret Thatcher in 1978 to prepare for the national election the following year, which resulted in bringing the Conservatives to power. The agency also did advertising in the subsequent three consecutive Tory victories up to 1992. Thatcher also relied on the advice of Gordon Reece, who tutored her about the importance of her physical appearance. In a 1981 TV interview about her meticulous attention to clothes, hairstyle, and makeup, Thatcher confided: "You have to think — what’s it going to look like in black and white on the front page of the Sun? Or what’s it going to look like on the news on television?" (cited in Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 185).

William Hague, the defeated Tory leader in the 2001 British election, paid close heed to the message of the American conservatives, while Blair relied on American speechwriter and strategist Robert Shrum. Other Labour parliamentary candidates used the services of American polling consultant, Mark Mellman. In 1999, one of Hague’s conferrees on political strategy was George W. Bush, then governor of Texas (Harwood, 1999, p. A18). The Tories’ and Hague’s overwhelming defeat in 2001 led to the party election of Iain Duncan Smith as its new leader. The Conservative Central Office promptly brought in American pollster and political consultant John McLaughlin, the man who is said to have organized the younger Bush’s political makeover from a right-wing, hanging governor image to a ‘compassionate conservative’, to be a key advisor. McLaughlin pushed the British Conservatives to stay the course but give more symbolic attention to the "most vulnerable in society". In the meantime, the party sent "a stream of Tory aides" to visit the U.S. to study how the Republicans organized their Philadelphia convention in 2000. The Tory conference in October 2002, with blacks, women, and young people seated up front, was designed as a "made-for-TV’ event", a "British version of the Philadelphia Story", very American but with "no cheerleaders, no balloons, and no spar spangled banner" (Baldwin, 2002; Platell, 2002).

Tony Blair’s move toward the political center is characteristic of Otto Kirchheimer’s observation in the 1960s of the tendency of Western political parties and interest groups to formally separate their identities from one another. Conservative parties (e.g., Republicans, Tories) publicly downplayed their associations with big business, and liberals (e.g., Democrats, Labour) with unions, which guided party and interest group leaders to pursue their objectives through ‘catch-all’ rhetorical strategies. "The interest group", Kirchheimer urged, "must never put all its eggs in one basket" (Kirchheimer, 1966, p. 193). This approach has worked well for corporate stakeholders in the United States, which are freed up to patronize both catch-all parties and thus block the formation of independent political parties, though not so well for unions — as striking pro-Reagan air traffic controllers bitterly learned in 1981. The centrist tendencies of catch-all British and American elections deflect attention from serious issues and elevate the importance of personality, ‘character’, style, and the ‘who’s ahead?’ elements of elections, while increasing reliance on professional expertise, software, and corporate patronage.

Two British political observers find that "British political communications have always appeared to be heavily influenced by American experiences" (Bartle & Griffiths, 2001, p. 12). Apart from its easy identification with American popular culture, sport, fashion, design, and entertainment, they note, British outlooks also have been affected by the work of an American, George Gallup, who first brought opinion polling methods to the country in the 1930s. In the 1950s, British politicians began to travel to the U.S. to study political campaign techniques. Conservative leader Edward Heath was impressed by Nixon’s 1968 election experience, and Margaret Thatcher was a great admirer of the political style of Ronald Reagan. Tory prime minister John Major participated in White House-style press conferences and agreed to holding a U.S. presidential-style TV debate, both firsts in Britain, in preparation for the 1997 election (Barbash, 1997). Labour leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in turn, took many of their cues from Bill Clinton in the reconceptualization of their party. One of the techniques adopted from the U.S. in the 1990s by both Labour and the Conservatives was the use of opposition research and rapid rebuttal, using computer data to maintain an edge in the art of spin and the battle for image and propaganda. Blair viewed the package of polling, focus groups, and the marketing of candidates as "part of the democratization of modern elections" (quoted in Frank, 2000, p. 49).

Philip Gould, one of Tony Blair’s advisors and leading political strategists in the early 1990s, spoke of the powerful lessons he absorbed as an upclose observer of the Clinton election of 1992, his professional relationship with Stanley Greenberg and other Clinton consultants, and the ideological ‘road map’ and ‘war room’ tactics that the New Democrats passed on to Labour:

"I was not a lone voice for Clinton within Labour. Margaret McDonagh, Hohn Braggins and Alan Barnard, who were to hold senior positions in the 1997 election campaign, were all working in one capacity or another for Clinton. Jonathan Powell, then working for the British Embassy in Washington, now Tony Blair’s chief of staff, was observing the Clinton campaign at first hand and building links that were later to prove priceless. Out of all this was born Millbank Tower [Labour Party headquarters] and the ‘war room’ it housed; rapid rebuttal and the Excalibur computer; [used to monitor opposition communications] an obsession with message; and a tough unremitting focus on hard-working people and their concerns....At the time the message of Little Rock was not heard, but it could not be silenced. The Clinton experience was seminal for the Labour Party. Within five years almost everything that was written in my document had been implemented. Modernisation of Labour did not depend on Clinton, it would have happened anyway, but his election did give modernisation a road map" (Gould, 1998, pp. 176-177).

The Conservatives also pursued their campaign lessons from their trans- Atlantic partners. Emulating American-style elections, Saatchi and Saatchi undertook a more ‘scientific’ and psychographics approach to winning, studying what one of its executives called "the emotional attitudes which emerge when ordinary people discuss politics". He noted that in the 1983 election the agency engaged in "hours of discussion about finding the right tone, which had to be ‘warm, confident, non-divisive, and exciting’" and focussed on "directional research, target areas, how to attract women voters, skilled workers and much else" (quoted in McNair, 1999, p. 110). Saatchi and Saatchi also put clever political advertising slogans in posters and print media for the Thatcher campaign in 1978-1979, such as "Labour isn’t working" (with a photo of a group of disheveled ‘unemployed’ individuals standing in queue), "Educashun isn’t working" and "Cheer up! Labour can’t hang on for ever" (Rosenbaum, 1997, pp. 14-15).

Following the 1987 election, the Conservatives, still in power but suffering some setbacks, brought in Republican consultant Richard Wirthlin, who extensively used computers to organize psychographic classifications in gauging public values, attitudes and lifestyles and introduce the Tories to the use of ‘power phrases’ (Rosenbaum, 1997, p. 171-174). The Conservatives sent a delegation to the U.S. in 1991 to speak with Republican leaders in preparation for the 1992 British election, and their leader William Hague visited with both the Republicans and the Canadian conservative leadership in February 1999. Labour too did not shrink from the opportunity to garner foreign advice and use foreign consultants, hiring the U.S. Democratic Party firm of Mellman and Lazarus to teach them the art of ‘people metering’ (also known as perception analyzers) — the use of electronic handsets to test focus group members’ visceral reactions to phrases, slogans, advertisements, styles, and other political symbols and behavior. The Conservatives also took the lead in the use of computers in the election of 1992, although Labour bypassed them in this technological application in the 1997 campaign. Computers were particularly important in the expanded use of direct mail.

As in the United States but on a slight time-delay basis, communications technology has become increasingly central to British electioneering. In the early 1970s, well below half of British households had telephones, but by 1994, the penetration rate had reached 91%. This made it practical to employ telephone marketing as an important technique in election contests, and it also enabled the extension of the traditional period of campaigning by months or years. As in the U.S., professionals have a free hand in collecting past voting records of voters, along with other personal information about their habits and lifestyles, which helps candidates profile their political values and chart and influence their political behavior. Consistent with the principles and logic of the industrialization of politics is the tendency for professionals to invest their energies and resources in capturing the marginal (or ‘swing’) voters, those whose voting habits are not very predictable (Denver & Hands, 2001, pp. 80-82).

Compared to the U.S., however, the British press plays a more active role in articulating the range of the nation’s political opinions, while British television, on the other hand, is not as dominant an influence in news coverage. However, with the televising of the proceedings in the House of Commons, starting in 1989, television has become more influential, and members of parliament have learned to play to the camera as a way of soliciting public attention and support (Rosenbaum, 1997, pp. 85-87). The major British newspapers and magazines are considerably more vibrant, sometimes outrageously so, than their American counterparts, and their management are more willing to work with political parties and openly express partisan viewpoints. Rupert Murdoch, Australian turned American in the 1990s, owns a number of media enterprises in the UK, including the Times, Sunday Times, Sun, News of the World, and the all-European satellite Sky Channel. An arch-conservative, Murdoch nonetheless supported Blair as prime minister in the last two elections, although he has not had much use for the Labour Party. As a major player in the United States and Asia, Murdoch represents global commercial interests and outlooks of the media industry on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific. One should not necessarily consider these influences on media and politics as ‘American’ as much as transnational, commercial, and hyperindustrial.