Tightly controlled campaigns have a whiff of Pyongyang

Ed Miliband's aides insist they are "not being North Korean" in their approach, but there is something about the Labour leader's election campaign that has the whiff of a western tourist's experience of Pyongyang.

There are plenty of images of Mr Miliband meeting adoring party workers, posing for selfies with "Milifans" or looking statesmanlike behind a lectern, but one thing is often missing: encounters with voters.

Meanwhile, David Cameron has also been shielded from the masses by his media minders, who have operated a tightly controlled campaign that appears to have sucked energy from the prime minister's performances.

Mr Cameron tends to favour rallies in front of Conservative supporters or meeting voters in controlled environments such as factories or shops, where workers are less likely to cause a scene in front of their bosses.

The conventional wisdom in both camps is that a less controlled campaign entails too many risks, a view borne out on one of Mr Cameron's few walkabouts - a stroll through the genteel town of Alnwick - when a man with a ukulele told the prime minister to "f*** off back to Eton".

Mr Miliband was taking no such chance when he made a quick visit to a cafe in Crouch End in north London this month. The apparently spur-of-the-moment event was unusual in that all the cafe's customers were either Labour activists or had been made to register to attend.

Both leaders are anxious to avoid the kinds of encounter that have attracted so much attention in previous elections, including Gordon Brown's meeting with "that bigoted woman" Gillian Duffy, Tony Blair being confronted outside a hospital and John Prescott punching an egg-throwing voter.

For Mr Miliband, the image makers have tried to present him as a prime minister-in-waiting, dressing him in a dark suit, white shirt and blue tie and positioning him in front of an omnipresent lectern to give him added gravitas.

Meeting potentially hostile voters is not part of that script: Mr Miliband's main impromptu encounters with members of the public come on the short journey from a train into his official car - as at Newcastle station on Tuesday.

Mr Miliband's lectern was even wheeled out for a speech in the middle of a field last week. But officials insist the Labour leader sees more members of the public than Mr Cameron.

"He went to a Gujarati class yesterday," said one aide, speaking on the margins of a speech given by Mr Miliband in Stockton on Monday. Without a lectern? "There was a lectern involved," the aide admitted.

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First Mr Miliband took questions from the audience - almost all party members or supporters - starting with one man who prefaced his question with: "Can I wish you all the best in the campaign."

Mr Miliband then took questions from journalists, whose attempts at probing questions were met with heckling and hissing. The Labour leader had to ask the audience to respect the work done by reporters.

Access for journalists to the party leaders is tightly controlled with most of the information about campaign events circulated only at the eleventh hour. To avoid details leaking out, activists too are often notified at the last minute. One Tory member told the FT his invitation to a Cameron rally arrived at 10.30pm the day before it happened.

The traditional "battle bus", which used to see reporters encamped with party leaders for the duration of the campaign, is no more. Mr Miliband usually travels by car and his bus is virtually empty.

Conservative officials say Mr Cameron meets more voters than the Labour leader and reporters who have covered both tours say the prime minister's schedule is more relentless and covers far more ground.

But the controlled nature of the Conservative campaign was exposed by one telling picture of the prime minister addressing a "rally" in a vast and virtually empty agricultural shed in Cornwall, with supporters arranged to give the impression of mass support.

While Mr Miliband's remoteness might perversely help him to look more prime ministerial, Mr Cameron has the opposite problem: he is under pressure to inject authenticity and "passion" into his campaign.

In 2010, Tory campaign managers grappled with a similar dilemma of how to convince voters that Mr Cameron really wanted to win. One tactic was to put him on a bus for a cross-country overnight tour on the eve of polling day.

Conservative campaign managers took a different approach in the 1992 election campaign, embracing the wish of John Major to take on all comers in a soapbox tour that gave the Tory prime minister the unlikely air of the insurgent.

"At the time, most people said that our campaign was shambolic and hopeless," recalled Jonathan Hill, a Major aide and now Britain's EU commissioner in Brussels.

"We did it because it was what he wanted to do and actually it fired him up and there was a sense of authenticity that was effective," he told the FT in March. "It was in contrast with Kinnock, whom the Labour party were controlling and keeping from exposure to the public."

David Cameron, a desk officer at Tory Central Office in 1992, will recall that the risk appeared to pay off. But will he dare to repeat it?

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