The 1992 Election, the NHS and the ‘War of Jennifer’s Ear’

Article by Simon Mackley. Edited by Ellie Veryard.

Party election broadcasts rarely make for gripping television. In an age when television news gives politicians ample opportunities to convey their messages via sound bites and interviews, the five-minute slots given over to the parties lack the significance they once had. Yet in spite of this, at the 1992 General Election a broadcast by Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party became one of the defining events of the entire campaign. Attacking the alleged privatisation of the NHS under the Conservative government of John Major, the broadcast was based on the case of a five-year-old girl called Jennifer, who at the time of the election had been waiting eleven months for a simple operation on her ear. Although the broadcast kept Jennifer anonymous, her full name and details were swiftly leaked to the press, triggering a fierce political row about the accuracy of the broadcast, the ethics of using a child’s illness for political capital and the alleged complicity of Labour and the Conservatives in making the case public. Paradoxically though the controversy, dubbed the ‘war of Jennifer’s ear’ after the 18th century War of Jenkins’ Ear, had the result of detracting from the issue of the NHS’s future, derailing one of the key themes of Labour’s campaign. 

Labour’s broadcast on March 24th 1992 was undeniably powerful. Opening to the tune of B. B. King’s ‘Someone Really Loves You’, the viewer was greeted by the sight of two young girls in a hospital waiting room, each clutching their ear in pain. The two girls, a caption informed the viewer, were both suffering from the same condition: however, only one could afford private treatment. Although they are examined by a doctor at the same time, the mother of the first girl is left dumbstruck as she is told that her daughter will have to wait until the end of the year for her operation. The well heeled mother of the second child encounters no such difficulties however, and her daughter is quickly treated. No longer in pain, the second girl returns to school and goes back to living her happy and carefree life. The first girl is also shown returning to school, but by contrast it is clear that her condition is making her miserable: a montage shows how her continued pain is causing her to become aggressive and isolated at school, culminating in a shot of her crying alone in the toilets. Contrasting the two girls one final time, the film ends with the message ‘It’s their future. Don’t let it end in tiers’. 

The film was immediately followed by a recorded message from Neil Kinnock, directly attacking the Conservatives’ record on the NHS, but it really wasn’t necessary: despite having no narration, the film had perfectly conveyed the key message of Labour’s campaign. Of course, there was no denying that it was a blatant emotional appeal, and party staffers were expecting elements within the right-wing press to criticise its tone in their morning coverage. However, nobody could have predicted the scale of the controversy that was about to erupt. 

The next morning, just a few hours after the broadcast, the story exploded in the Daily Express under the dramatic headline of ‘EXPOSED: Labour’s Sick NHS Stunts’. The story, which also appeared in the Independent under the somewhat calmer headline of ‘Election Broadcast Tugs at Heartstrings’, made two key claims: firstly, that the broadcast had depicted the case of a real life child which both papers named as Jennifer Bennett, and secondly that, while the broadcast had alleged that Jennifer’s plight was due to a lack of resources within the NHS caused by Tory policies of privatisation, her operation had in fact only been delayed due to an administrative error. Labour thus stood charged with not only with cynically exploiting a small girl’s misery for political advantage, but with deliberately misleading the public as well. 

Taken by surprise, the Labour campaign scrambled to defend itself. Yes, the party admitted, the broadcast had been based upon Jennifer’s case. Her situation had been brought to Labour’s attention by her father, who in an attempt to overcome the continual delays afflicting his daughter’s case had written to Robin Cook, the Shadow Health Secretary. Later, Labour had contacted Mr Bennett asking for permission to use the case in a party broadcast, permission which Bennett gave on the grounds that his daughter was not identifiable in the film. Thus, the party argued, some of the more extreme claims it had used in the girl’s case without her parents’ consent were incorrect. 

More serious for Labour though was the charge that they had misrepresented the reasons for Jennifer’s plight. Having been contacted by the press, Mr Ardouin, the consultant in Jennifer’s case, had given a statement blaming administrative errors for the delay in her operation. Curiously, Labour decided against taking the more obvious option of simply defending the broadcast as being only loosely based upon Jennifer’s case, and instead stuck with its original line that the problem was caused by Tory neglect of the NHS. As luck would have it however, the media soon got hold of a private letter from Ardouin to the Bennetts which specifically blamed a lack of resources for the delay, seemingly supporting Labour’s claims and calling the credibility of the consultant into question. 

By this point though, the question of what issues lay behind Jennifer’s situation was becoming rapidly overshadowed by the growing maelstrom of accusations surrounding who was to blame for the leaking of Jennifer’s details to the press. Given that the Bennetts had specifically not wanted publicity for the case, it was the leak rather than the delay in the operation that the media deemed to be the real scandal and the whole process rapidly descended into a witch hunt. The Labour Party, still fending off accusations that they shouldn’t have tried to make use of Jennifer’s case in the first place, was forced to concede that Julie Hall, Neil Kinnock’s press secretary, had indeed let slip to the press that the girl in the broadcast was called Jennifer, but denied having given any further details. Acting swiftly to avoid any trace of guilt by association with their supporters at the Daily Express, the Conservative Party denied all blame for the leak, instead  claiming it was the result of Ardouin’s talkativeness and Labour’s allegedly Nazi-like ‘propaganda’ machine.

This line of defence came spectacularly undone however when Sir Nicholas Lloyd, the editor of the Daily Express, admitted that Conservative Central Office had given the paper Ardouin’s name, and the party was soon forced to admit that, when Ardouin had contacted them about the broadcast, a junior press officer had actually suggested to him that he should tell the story to the Express. The controversy took an even more unexpected turn when it emerged that, while Jennifer’s father had been discussing the broadcast with Labour, Jennifer’s Conservative-supporting mother had contacted her local party association about it, which had in turn fired off a warning to Central Office that Labour were planning to use the case in their broadcast. In the aftermath of the election, some Labour figures suspected that the whole affair had been a carefully-organised Tory trap. However, given the limited nature of the details passed to central office, not even including the girl’s name, and the apparent internal confusion that accompanied the Conservative’s admissions, it would seem more likely that the party was as much overwhelmed by the chaos of the controversy as Labour was. 

In the meantime, media coverage of the scandal had reached fever-pitch, with the ‘war’ consistently featuring night after night as the leading item on the evening news. With both parties at this point desperate to escape this mess, it was left to Michael Heseltine to make an extraordinary appeal to the media ‘on behalf of all political parties’, for the story to be dropped so that they could get back to the issues. Astonishingly, the media appeared to comply with this request, although the exhaustion of the story probably played more of a role than any desire to address Heseltine’s pleas. Speculation on the leak largely came to a halt, and the campaign returned to the relative calm that had characterised it prior to Labour’s broadcast. 

So who then were the winners of this war? Neither Labour nor the Conservatives emerged from the controversy looking particularly good, with polls consistently showing voter disgust at behaviour of both parties. Neither can Jennifer be considered in any way a winner: while happily she was able to get her operation, this had actually occurred before Labour’s broadcast went out, so the Bennetts gained nothing from the publicity. Nonetheless, there is reason to suspect that the Conservatives might have benefitted in the long run. 

With the witch hunt over the leak dominating news coverage, the actual questions about the NHS that Labour had hoped to provoke went ignored. By focussing on the case of an individual, Labour lost sight of their central argument against Conservative health policy, which they had hoped to make a core feature of their campaign. Furthermore, in the aftermath of the row, Labour largely shied away from debating health issues lest they reignite the controversy, despite polling showing that the issue chimed well with potential voters. It is not at all far-fetched to believe that had the party’s attempts to press forward with the general theme of NHS investment not been derailed by the scandal, Labour could have performed better at the polls. 

In the end, John Major’s Conservatives won a majority by the narrowest of margins. Had just a few votes changed hands then the 1992 election could have produced a hung parliament. In this context, the ‘War of Jennifer’s Ear’ might have had a considerable impact after all. 

• Other examples of patients used by political parties to challenge the system include Iain Duncan Smith’s claims an elderly patient had been neglected in 2002 and Michael Howard’s attack on delayed treatment and cancelled operations for 2 patients in 2004 and 2005. The first was revealed to be a clerical error and the second strongly denied by the Labour Party. 

• An independent survey conducted by Ipsos Mori in 2004 found that users of the NHS were generally very positive about their experience; 92% were satisfied by their in-hospital treatment and 87% with their GP. 64% of respondents believed the press was overtly critical of the NHS with 50% of all respondents stating they did not trust the media’s representation. Over 3/4s of those asked believed family, friends and health leaflets provided the best information. Despite this criticisms of the NHS continue to play a major role in the media and politics.

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