Can a new Saatchi poster put Tories on winning track?

Thirty-six years after Saatchi & Saatchi came up with their famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster, which the Tory party treasurer at the time credited with putting Margaret Thatcher in power, a new Saatchi poster was launched yesterday.

Just like the 1979 poster (see below), it’s punchy and it puts the emphasis on the “risk” of voting Labour rather than the “gain” of voting Conservative.

There is no party logo on show - M&C Saatchi have opted for just a small ‘Vote Conservative’ tag line in the corner. “It suggests that the Tories are less interested in bigging up their own brand than they are in terrifying voters about the prospect of a Miliband government,” The Spectator reports.

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The 1979 poster was controversial because – surprise, surprise - it quickly transpired that the supposedly endless queue outside an employment office had been staged using volunteers from the Hendon Young Conservatives.

Worse still, 100 had been asked to take part but only 20 showed up and the same people had to be spliced together to form the “queue” – not such an easy task a decade before Photoshop was released.

Launching the new Saatchi poster yesterday, Tory party chairman Grant Shapps said: “We are on the way to full employment, a job for everyone who wants one. But the recovery is fragile: it could be crushed by Labour’s wrecking ball. Ed Miliband is hellbent on spending, borrowing and taxing more, meaning chaos for hardworking families…”

The Saatchi ad, needless to say, puts it rather more succinctly.

But having a great poster is one thing – being able to afford to cover the nation’s billboards with it is another. Which is where Tory fund-raising makes all the difference. They have four times the money available to Labour, and can spend it on poster campaigns and mail-shots.

As the Evening Standard’s Andrew Neather reported yesterday from the ultra-marginal seat of Hampstead and Kilburn: “It costs around £25,000 to send a second-class letter to every household in the constituency – the Conservatives send theirs first class.”