There is going to be a general election in Britain later this year, and in preparation for the campaign the Labour party has appointed a new advisor to take charge of its advertising—someone it must have judged particularly well equipped to articulate its vision and popularize its ideals. The job went to Trevor Beattie.
Trevor who? No, not many people in Britain have heard of him, either. But in the advertising trade he is a legendary figure, renowned for his ingenious ploys. Above all he is the genius who brooded on the fact that the fashion firm French Connection, which is one of his clients, is based in the United Kingdom, and who came up with the acronym “FCUK.” It’s a brand-name which now stares out at you from billboards and magazines and all kinds of other places as well: you can wear a FCUK tee-shirt, or shave yourself with
FCUKshaving-cream. And in its combination of cheap cleverness and crude “transgressiveness” it tells you a good deal about the texture of British life in recent years. The Labour party used to pride itself on having drawn much of its early inspiration from Ruskin, William Morris, and other Victorian prophets. (A common saying was that “we owe more to Morris”—or sometimes it was Methodism—“than to Marx.”) It would make a pretty picture to imagine contemporary Labour leaders introducing Ruskin to Trevor Beattie, or lecturing Morris on the importance of the Fcuk Factor. Still, there Beattie
