Now that the conference season is over, we can compare not just the party policies, but their logos too. Last week’s Tory conference taught us the patriotic adaptation of their tree — now draped in the Union Flag — doesn’t work any better than the original green-tree symbol. The old symbol demonstrated Conservative values as imagined by the Innocent smoothie design team. It said ‘Tradition’. It said ‘the Environment’. It said, ‘Look what I can do with my crayons, Mummy.’
Stephen Bayley, design expert and Spectator colleague, was one of the hapless advisers tasked with picking the old logo. ‘Not so great,’ he told me, ‘but you should have seen the alternatives.’ The Union Flag tree was in part the brainchild of Andy Coulson, who felt the British flag should be involved somehow. But it looks like a sop to the disillusioned Tory right, meeting the improbable brief of being both patronising and scary.
Never underestimate the power of a strong institutional image, as one old ad slogan went. From the cross to the swastika (itself a conscious denial of the former when nicked by the Nazis), good logos are loaded with significance. At best, they should be shorthand for complex ideas — daubing a hammer and sickle on to the wall of your local McDonald’s is quicker, more effective and a damn sight less boring than copying out the entirety of Das Kapital.
You wouldn’t see this with the Tory logo, old or new. Nor would you get it from Labour. The red is a start — but the rose? You’d think they were a socialist dating agency. The most interesting thing you could say of the Lib Dems’ ‘Bird of Freedom’ is that it has an unfortunate similarity to the logo of Holland’s hard-right Party for Freedom.
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