Tories float dead duck in new-look fightback by Christopher Parry
In a lavish ceremony at the Millennium Dome today, Tory leader David Cameron will unveil his party’s innovative ‘Dead Duck’ icon. The new-look symbol, result of a £500,000 branding exercise, will appear on all the party’s literature and media broadcasts. A version of the image will also be beamed into the night sky above Conservative Central Office.
Cameron, currently struggling to make ground against Gordon Brown, will use today's event to make a hard-hitting speech reasserting traditional Tory links to the countryside, while maintaining the green credentials that have upset traditionalists. In a symbolic piece of stage management, he will stand in front of a ten-metre high representation of the duck, and strategists have been debating whether to put a real-live dead duck on the lectern as the party leader speaks.
The dead duck was selected at the end of a gruelling four-month process. ‘It was a tough call,’ said Deputy Party Chairman Sir Richard Toohey, one of the panel that selected the winning design. ‘There was a really positive reaction from party members to the idea of using a silhouette of Margaret Thatcher, but in the end it just looked like a map of the Isle of Wight. Everyone's seen a duck. Children in rural communities will probably have seen them dead - in farmyards maybe after a fox has got in, floating belly-up in a pond after some outbreak of disease, or just lying by the side of the road having been hit by a car. The dead duck is a familiar image, and a reassuring one.’
Branding consultant Jake Marshall, whose Boomerang agency won the contract to revamp the Tory image on the back of recent campaigns for corporal punishment, the millennium dome and the ebola virus, was similarly enthusiastic about the result. ‘This is an image that will last as long as the party, perhaps longer. Branding is about association: people need to see dead duck and think Conservative party.’ .
Richard Toohey is also thinking long-term. ‘We're told that young people respond very favourably to the Montgomery Python “Dead Parrot” sketch, so we think this has a good chance of appealing to the youth vote as well. The Conservative party stands for the enduring greatness of our country. We look to the future from the ramparts of the past. The Conservative party is the past. It's history.’
