The Dead Cat Strategy - A Good Way to Overcome Poor Performance

Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn

On January 27, 2022, former prime minister Imran Khan alleged that the co-chairperson of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), Asif Ali Zardari, had hired assassins to kill him.

Outside Khan’s hardcore group of followers, very few treated the allegation with any seriousness, even though, understandably, the PPP was not amused. Ever since his ouster in April last year, Khan has been churning out one bizarre claim after another in his daily addresses and press talks.

Of course, being a classic populist in the mould of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Khan hardly ever provides any compelling evidence to back his allegations. Like his populist contemporaries, he too is more interested in remaining in the news and in Twitter trends. The other reason is to deflect the media’s attention away from the plethora of scandals involving his immediate family, his party personnel and himself.

These scandals have begun to engulf him, now that he doesn’t have the kind of protection that he once enjoyed from the military establishment and the judiciary when he was PM. The scandals have dented his self-styled image of being ‘incorruptible’.

By delivering speeches almost on a daily basis that are studded with sensationalist claims and allegations, Khan is using what has come to be known as the ‘dead cat strategy’ or ‘deadcatting’. Both these terms were first floated in 2013. They are derived from a theory of a political strategist who has a history of working for right-wing parties. This is also the reason why deadcatting is often seen as a strategy that has mostly been applied by right-wing politicians and contemporary populists.
 
Both the terms are associated with the Australian political strategist Lynton Crosby. Crosby strategised the British populist Boris Johnson’s campaign for the 2008 London mayoral election that Johnson won. Crosby was first appointed by Johnson’s Conservative Party (CP) during the 2005 parliamentary elections, which the party lost.

But after working successfully with Johnson during the 2008 mayoral election, Crosby became the CP’s central strategist. In a 2013 article for the Daily Telegraph, Johnson excitedly explained Crosby’s strategy. He wrote that one of Crosby’s tactics included, (figuratively speaking) throwing a dead cat on a dining table on which people sat talking about an issue that was detrimental to the interests of a politician. So, once they see the dead cat, their attention is drawn away from the issue and towards the dead cat. Now the dead cat becomes the issue.

‘Dead cat issues’ are thus sensationalist, formed to draw the people’s and the media’s attention away from the issues that have become increasingly problematic for a politician. Johnson continued to apply this strategy when he was appointed PM in 2019. As PM, he went on deploying dead cat issues to divert the media’s attention away from the many holes that he kept digging and falling into.

But deadcatting has its limits. There are but so many dead cats one can throw on the dining table. In 2022, becoming increasingly controversial, Johnson was forced to step down as PM by his own party. The media had stopped talking about dead cats.

In 2019, the populist president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López held a press conference to announce that he had written letters to the Pope and the Spanish government, demanding that they should apologise for invading Mexico… 500 years ago. This out-of-the-blue declaration surprised many. Why was a president who had vowed to resolve Mexico’s many problems, now suddenly talking about a 500-year-old invasion?

According to the British political journalist and author Andrew Scott, López had made a sizeable number of promises, which included introducing widespread land reforms, poverty alleviation and the elimination of Mexico’s deadly drug mafias. Failing to deliver on any of the promises, López deployed the dead cat strategy. The ploy was absurd, but it did catch the media’s attention.

However, not everyone was impressed by the president’s ‘bold’ initiative to get the Pope and the Spanish government to deliver an apology for a centuries-old invasion of Mexico, whose main victims were the country’s indigenous Indian communities. The famous Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa suggested that the letters should have been delivered to López himself, because he had done absolutely nothing to better the conditions of the impoverished Indian communities, except churn out populist slogans and display meaningless stunts.

In the early 1980s, when India’s Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) was largely a fringe far-right Hindu nationalist outfit that had no mentionable economic programme, it started to encourage groups who had begun to plan building a temple on the site of a 16th century mosque in Ayodhya. The BJP turned the mosque into a ‘national issue’.

This was BJP’s dead cat that provided it mainstream traction. And so are the claims by the current BJP government, which uses these to keep the media’s attention focused on the so-called existentialist ‘threat’ to India from Pakistan and by India’s Muslims.

Imran Khan has been deadcatting ever since his government started to unravel from 2020 onwards. Some of the favourite dead cats of Pakistani politicians are ‘issues’ of morality and faith. As a PM who was struggling to deliver the grandiose promises that he had made, and facing increasing criticism, Khan decided to declare himself as the leading crusader against Islamophobia.

He started to write letters to the United Nations and other leaders of the ‘Muslim ummah’, urging them to facilitate his idea of formulating a blasphemy law which could be applied internationally. His ministers jumped in, claiming that he was fighting an international ‘jihad’ against Islamophobes and should be hailed for this.

When this dead cat could not distract the media enough, Khan threw in a bigger dead feline, by claiming that the US was conspiring to oust him from power. After being shown the door by a no-confidence-motion in the parliament, he’s been tossing dead cats with increasing frequency.

Recently, one also saw the current finance minister, Ishaq Dar, deploy the dead cat strategy after being castigated by the media for failing to stabilise the economy. He had been brought in as a miracle worker, but his performance has been rather dismal.

Being a Pakistani, he of course began to tweet verses from Islam’s holy scriptures, indirectly suggesting that the failing economy was due to the mysterious ways of cosmic forces. Ironically, rather than diverting attention, this dead cat ended up magnifying his failings.

These Tory quacks and charlatans are beyond belief

Armando Ianucci in The Guardian

For some time now, Conservative strategist Lynton Crosby has been reassuring his adopted party they will reach “crossover”. This is the term he’s been using to describe the moment when they take over the lead from Labour in the polls and push ahead.

The date of crossover, rather like the rapture, keeps being pushed back. It was meant to be Christmas last year, but nothing of significance happened then apart from a particularly good Dr Who special. January was also disappointing, February was frigging desolate and March passed without a squeak. Now we’re in the middle of April, what TS Eliot described as “the cruellest month”: for the Tories that’s proved true, with Labour and Conservative still stuck on more or less 33%.

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It would be easy then for David Cameron to give up on Mr Crosby and his promise of good polls ahead; except, he can’t. Lynton Crosby is his Designated Bastard, the man his party has paid fistfuls of money to order all of them about and get them to do whatever it takes to win. It’s the stuff of tradition for Tory governments to get in an expensive Designated Bastard at election time; it’s the line of life, a cycle of comfort. The Designated Bastard arrives, tells them not to be pussies, puts up posters about Labour’s tax bombshells, flashes up cartoons of the Labour leader in the pocket of someone, or being the poodle of someone, sitting on someone’s lap, wearing someone’s hair, or being stuck up someone’s arse.

Usually, the party pays devoted attention to the Designated Bastard. First, because he’s so expensive but really because he’s such a Bastard. He gets them to do things they’ve spent the past five years being ordered not to under any circumstances. For five years, they’ve been clenching their teeth and talking about partnership and coalition. They’ve been pushing Big Societies and feeling everyone’s pain by sobbing that we’re all in it together.

Then the Designated Bastard comes along and tells them it’s OK now to junk all that, to accept that most of us voters are mean and self-interested, and that any appeal to our immediate material needs and to our deepest fears will work. The Designated Bastard will explain to them that to win, they’ll need to ignore those who won’t vote for them, and, if need be, to legislate against them. If it involves pushing welfare cuts for the young unemployed in order to pledge cuts to inheritance tax for the wealthier, then that’s what needs to be done. If it involves tempting council home occupants with the right to buy, at the expense of an already depleted social housing market, then it’s just tough teats to everyone. He’s a Bastard and he’s just telling you what you already know but never thought yourself capable of: you need to go in and display your inner Bastard to your constituents. It’s always worked and like the sun coming up it will happen again.

Except, this time, it seems not to be. Lynton Crossover hasn’t worked. And that’s a problem, since there is no plan B. The Tories believe in tradition and the tradition has always been that being a Bastard works. So panic sets in. Once panic starts, rational political behaviour falls apart. Hence the true “crossover” we got last week – the much commented on swapping of clothes brazenly taking part in the Labour and Conservative manifestos. Labour painted themselves as the party of fiscal rectitude, while the Tories went crazy on uncosted spending commitments. In this crazy looking-glass politics, Labour turn out to be the party with the most conservative financial commitment to the NHS, while the Conservatives are the most profligate.

This muddle has been a long time coming. For decades now, each main party has been defining itself on how similar it is to the other and how different it is from its own past. New Labour stole Thatcherite prudence and Cameroonian Conservativism detoxified its nasty image by going green and socially aware. Like two galaxies drawing closer to each other, it’s no wonder they ended up in a massive swirl of confusion. The spinning can’t be stopped: if anything, it gets faster and faster until you can’t tell which one is which.

Labour’s paranoia about looking like Old Labour I can understand: battered for so long by a mostly rightwing press, it still clings to a suspicion that even in this digital age the old tabloid headlines still affect people’s opinion. The Tory volte-face I find truly extraordinary, though. Normally, this type of trickery is done with just words. Last election, it was the verbal gymnastics contained in such slogans as “Vote Blue, Go Green” or that most perfect of semantic paradoxes, “Vote for Change: Vote Conservative”. It’s a basic trick with words, in which you take a word and insist it means its opposite. The more you insist, the greater chance people will believe you.

This time round, though, there is something desperate about the trick. They will “spend” on the NHS more than Labour, but that spending will be funded by carrying on with their “track record” on the economy. They’ll block Scottish MP’s voting on certain tax laws but that will somehow keep the UK united. They will rail against recklessness, but concede a European referendum to stave off a threat to their support and pledge billions in public spending based on no more than an inkling the economy’s going to keep growing.

All this time, they’ll muffle this panic with words such as “steady” and “on course”, words used to conceal an unsteady veer away from stability. They’re like bad magicians who, at the moment of subterfuge, simply shout: “What’s that?” and point to the other side of the room in the hope we’ll turn away.

This isn’t wordplay – this is charlatanism pure and simple. David Cameron is indulging in basic quackery, trying to sell you stuff he knows doesn’t work. He’s doing it with our money and he’s conjuring with people’s lives. We know there’s no magic; the money will come from the cuts and deficit reductions and benefit targets and financial squeezes on those Cameron knows won’t be voting for him anyway. It’s the bastardly misuse of the public purse and the final proof, if any were needed, that he is unfit to lead his country and his party unfit to govern.

Cigarette packaging: the corporate smokescreen

Noble sentiments about individual liberty are being used to bend democracy to the will of the tobacco industry

BETA

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 15 July 2013 20.39 BST

'Lynton Crosby personifies the new ­dispensation, in which men and women glide between corporations and ­politics, and appear to act as agents for big ­business within government.' Photograph: David Hartley / Rex Features

It's a victory for the hidden persuaders, the astroturfers, sock puppets, purchased scholars and corporate moles. On Friday the government announced that it will not oblige tobacco companies to sell cigarettes in plain packaging. How did it happen? The public was overwhelmingly in favour. The evidence that plain packets will discourage young people from smoking is powerful. But it fell victim to a lobbying campaign that was anything but plainly packaged.

Tobacco companies are not allowed to advertise their products. Nor, as they are so unpopular, can they appeal directly to the public. So they spend their cash on astroturfing(fake grassroots campaigns) and front groups. There is plenty of money to be made by people unscrupulous enough to take it.

Much of the anger about this decision has been focused on Lynton Crosby. Crosby is David Cameron's election co-ordinator. He also runs a lobbying company that works for the cigarette firms Philip Morris and British American Tobacco. He personifies the new dispensation, in which men and women glide between corporations and politics, and appear to act as agents for big business within government. The purpose of today's technocratic politics is to make democracy safe for corporations: to go through the motions of democratic consent while reshaping the nation at their behest.

But even if Crosby is sacked, the infrastructure of hidden persuasion will remain intact. Nor will it be affected by the register of lobbyists that David Cameron will announce on Tuesday, antiquated before it is launched.

Nanny state, health police, red tape, big government: these terms have been devised or popularised by corporate front groups. The companies who fund them are often ones that cause serious harm to human welfare. The front groups campaign not only against specific regulations, but also against the very principle of the democratic restraint of business.

I see the "free market thinktanks" as the most useful of these groups. Their purpose, I believe, is to invest corporate lobbying with authority. Mark Littlewood, the head of one of these thinktanks – the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) – has described plain packaging as "the latest ludicrous move in the unending, ceaseless, bullying war against those who choose to produce and consume tobacco". Over the past few days he's been in the media repeatedly, railing against the policy. So do the IEA's obsessions just happen to coincide with those of the cigarette firms? The IEA refuses to say who its sponsors are and how much they pay. But as a result of persistent digging, we now know that British American Tobacco, Philip Morris and Japan Tobacco International have been funding the institute – in BAT's case since 1963. British American Tobacco has admitted that it gave the institute £20,000 last year and that it's "planning to increase our contribution in 2013 and 2014".

Otherwise it's a void. The IEA tells me, "We do not accept any earmarked money for commissioned research work from any company." Really? But whether companies pay for specific publications or whether they continue to fund a body that – by the purest serendipity – publishes books and pamphlets that concur with the desires of its sponsors, surely makes no difference.

The institute has almost unrivalled access to the BBC and other media, where it promotes the corporate agenda without ever being asked to disclose its interests. Because they remain hidden, it retains a credibility its corporate funders lack. Amazingly, since 2011 Mark Littlewood has also been the government's adviser on cutting the regulations that business doesn't like. Corporate conflicts of interest intrude into the heart of this country's political life.

In 2002, a letter sent by the philosopher Roger Scruton to Japan Tobacco International (which manufactures Camel, Winston and Silk Cut) was leaked. In the letter, Professor Scruton complained that the £4,500 a month JTI was secretly paying him to place pro-tobacco articles in newspapers was insufficient: could they please raise it to £5,500?

Scruton was also working for the Institute of Economic Affairs, through which he published a major report attacking the World Health Organisation for trying to regulate tobacco. When his secret sponsorship was revealed, the IEA pronounced itself shocked: shocked to find that tobacco funding is going on in here. It claimed that "in the past we have relied on our authors to come forward with any competing interests, but that is going to change ... we are developing a policy to ensure it doesn't happen again." Oh yes? Eleven years later I have yet to find a declaration in any IEA publication that the institute (let alone the author) has been taking money from companies with an interest in its contents.

The IEA is one of several groups that appear to be used as a political battering ram by tobacco companies. On the TobaccoTactics website you can find similarly gruesome details about the financial interests and lobbying activities of, for example, the Adam Smith Institute and the Common Sense Alliance.

Even where tobacco funding is acknowledged, only half the story is told. Forest, a group that admits that "most of our money is donated by UK-based tobacco companies", has spawned a campaign against plain packaging called Hands Off Our Packs. The Department of Health has published some remarkable documents, alleging the blatant rigging of signatures on a petition launched by this campaign. Hands Off Our Packs is run by Angela Harbutt. She lives with Mark Littlewood.

Libertarianism in the hands of these people is a racket. All those noble sentiments about individual liberty, limited government and economic freedom are nothing but a smokescreen, a disguised form of corporate advertising. Whether Mark Littlewood, Lynton Crosby or David Cameron articulate it, it means the same thing: ideological cover for the corporations and the very rich.

Arguing against plain packaging on the Today programme, Mark Field MP, who came across as the transcendental form of an amoral, bumbling Tory twit, recited the usual tobacco company talking points, with their usual disingenuous disclaimers. In doing so, he made a magnificent slip of the tongue. "We don't want to encourage young people to take up advertising ... er, er, to take up tobacco smoking." He got it right the first time.